Love to London

I’m in New York visiting friends and was awoken with terrible news of a coordinated set of bombings in London. As of writing, the death toll is at 37, approximately the number of troops who die every two weeks in Iraq. And yet, there is something different about carnage that erupts among civilians on their way to work. It saddens us. It enrages us. It makes us stop everything we are doing and ask why. And then we get dressed, go outside, and continue living exactly as we lived before. Because ultimately it’s not war and it doesn’t threaten our way of life.Today’s attack in London is a limp gesture of generalized rage at a culture that can absorb such atrocities without permanent damage. The challenge for all of us is to make sure that the atrocity does not change us, that we do not use it to justify the whittling away of our freedoms, and that we vigorously defend the very principles that make us different from and better than our attackers. It is my sincere hope that England upholds these ideals. America, tragically, has not.