London

I'm struck by the awful irony of it, Bush: the image on the front page of today's New York Times, with a mass of Londoners cheering wildly in Trafalgar Square to celebrate their victory yesterday in the 2012 Olympic sweepstakes; and those I've seen today, on television and the Internet, with Londoners bloodied, burned, scared, terrorized. As I write, there seem to be no confirmed suspects, but it sure looks like Al Qaeda planning and coordination. I'm not about to Monday-morning-quarterback this dreadful event, whose brutality needs no elaboration on my part. From any human point of view, the attack on innocent and unsuspecting people is indefensible, an offense against any reasonable person's sense of decency. If it was done, again, in the name of Islam, the act is nothing more than a bloody insult to that religion and all those who practice it. I grieve not only for those who suffered from this arrogant abuse and contempt for human life, but also for our species, which seems to have arrived at a point in its evolutionary history where such aberrant behavior is shocking, yes, when it happens, but sadly no longer surprising. We need to think not only of our anger and our need for retaliation or revenge, Bush. We need also to think more globally about where we stand as a species on this planet, and what we plan to do about it for the good of all who share it. Or else we'll end up hating and distrusting each other ever more bitterly, and hastening our own extinction in the process. I hope you're thinking about this at your conference. By the way, I wrote the following before I heard about the London tragedy.

S.O.S

Momentous happenings.
The leaders of the world
meet in cofnerence.
They think to decide
the future of the world;
who gets to be hungry,
who gets to eat;
whether the ice caps
will melt; whether
the air and the water
will be clean, to drink
and breathe. They think
to decide the economy
of the world, on growth
and progress. This
is called "power."
Meanwhile, the rest of us
human beings must build
what my friend Bill calls
"sacred lifeboats,"
to save our souls.
Or, as the French say,
nicely, Sauve qui peut.
The ship is sinking, friends.
Lower the lifeboats.