What's crazy is after the first plane hits, they're laughing :youre-laughing: and they go straight back into celebrity gossip, because they thought it was an accident. Once the second hits, they realize it's a terrorist attack and the tone totally shifts and they immediately start beating the drums of war.

It reminds me of this metaphor I heard reading about Buddhism. Imagine that you're on a boat going through the fog, and you bump into another boat. If there's nobody in the boat, you're startled by the bump, but then you quickly forget about it and move on. But if there is someone in the boat, maybe you get mad at them, and you yell, "Idiot! Watch where you're going!" and it sticks with you all day. Why is that? Well, the difference is that you think you can change their behavior and stop it from happening again by expressing your anger, but the extent to which this is true is questionable. While we might say "bullying works," if you lose your head you can end up looking like :frothingfash:, and sometimes it's more effective to educate, or to try to understand where they're going wrong. The metaphor is good because it serves as a reminder to keep things in perspective, and to understand what your anger is trying to accomplish so you can question whether there might be a more effective method to change people than just lashing out.

Nobody cares or cared about the event itself or the people who died. That's just the empty boat. They only care because there was somebody in the boat who dared to defy the international order. And all that anyone wanted to do was lash out, not heal the damage, not understand what happened, not think about what lashing out would even accomplish, just this totally unhinged rage.