Requiescat (et Vivet) in Pacem

In my alumi magazine that came today, there was a sad obituary for a woman from the class of 2000 who had died in January. The last sentence in the article indicated that her 22 month old daughter had died the same day. The list of grieving relatives did not include her husband, so I decided to look online and see if I could find out what happened. It turned out that she and her baby were the wife and child that were killed by a crazy British man who then fled back to England. After I read the first article about it, the whole story came back to me, and I remembered how crazy it was. I remembered it mostly because whenever I see a story like that, I always spend a few horrible minutes imagining what it must have been like for a mother to be there when her child was killed. This guy’s exploits have been grist for Nancy Grace and Greta van whatever and so I will not go into the details here. Still, once I found out she had gone to my college, I suddenly felt as if I knew her a little bit, or at least had probably known someone just like her when I was at school.

Unfortunately, she was not the first person from my college to be murdered since I graduated. I think 9 alums were killed on September 11, including a woman from my class that I did not know and a guy the year behind me who I knew and had shared beers with, although we were not in touch after college. A drop-out from my class was killed by a drug dealer in Florida, which was quite shocking (although it probably shouldn’t have been) considering I went to a small Catholic college. The worst thing that happened to someone that I met in college involved a guy named Nelson who was a year ahead of me that I had met when I was a freshman. I didn’t really know him, and after my first year I never spent any time with him again. He graduated, and then at his own graduation party he was stabbed to death by a childhood friend who had just had some sort of psychic break and murdered his own mother. I received this news when I got back to campus for my senior year, but I was not really able to wrap my head around this sort of information at the time, because I only knew a few people who had died at that point, and all of them had been sick.

Unfortunately having a spouse deployed gives you lots of time to think about people dying and all of the different ways it could happen. My husband always gives me a cleaned up version of what’s happening in Afghanistan, but the night that he spent hours in a bunker after a rocket attack on the US Embassy, he asked me what I had heard or seen about it. I don’t see much news, mainly because I don’t want the kids to see anything that will upset them, so I searched the Washington Post after I hung up. The “massive explosion” from the “rocket attack” merited three lines in the Post. Unfortunately for my husband and everyone else in the bunkers over there, Tom Cruise had a baby that day, so the column inches were needed for news that people really wanted to hear.

In addition to having a husband deployed, we know many other people - some friends, some acquaintances - that are also deployed or soon to deploy. I don’t like to think about the day to day danger they all face because it is too paralyzing. I like to pretend we’ve got everything under control and the bad guys on the run, much as the president would like me to, but every now and then I get a little wake up call that things aren’t going as well as we’d all like. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend I made in Kentucky, informing everyone that her husband’s humvee had been hit by an IED. He survived with a concussion, but two others he was with were killed and a third had head injuries. When I went online to find out if this accident had been reported, I found an article about one of the guys who had been killed, Spc. Scott M. Bandhold. He had worked at Disney World and on cruise ships as an entertainer, and at a casino in Portugal. He was inspired to enlist after September 11, when he was 34, so he was a little older than most of the soldiers over there, but I am sure his experience was the same.

I’m sure the moment of death for anyone in a trauma is surreal, but lately I seem to be thinking about it all the time. I think watching that movie Grizzly Man was what kicked off these latest ponderings for me. Actually, I could only watch parts of it since the Grizzly Man made me cringe so much because he seemed so out of touch with reality. The movie is a documentary about a guy who goes to live with the bears and seems to think they love him. At the end of the movie he and his girlfriend get eaten by a bear, and I immediately began to think how in the midst of the horror of undergoing such a violent and ghastly death, he must have had a moment where it all seemed too crazy to be true. He had been an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and supposedly almost getting the role of Woody on Cheers, and here he was being eaten by a bear.

All of the westerners who have been taken hostage in Iraq must have similar moments. The one I puzzle over most was Nick Berg, a guy from Pennsylvania who was 26 and went to Iraq as businessman looking for work. He hadn’t spent much time in the Middle East, and I imagine him to be a Philly guy similar to my husband and his friends. Added to the shock and terror of being murdered must have been some measure of bewilderment that he was in a place so far from what he knew, being subjected to a death that most of us imagine we will only see in movies like Braveheart or Gladiator.

One summer when I was buying sunscreen at the Happy Harry’s pharmacy near my parents’ house, I saw a newspaper article taped to the counter next to a donation jar. The donations were needed for the family of two women who were crushed when a dump truck was trying to make a sharp turn and tipped over onto their car, crushing them. The accident took place outside Bootsie’s Barbecue, a place down the street from my parents where we bought dinner a couple times every summer. I had never heard of the accident, and neither had my parents, but it seemed especially sad to me, because they probably never saw it coming. The roof probably started caving in on them and before they could figure out what was happening they were gone. This seemed like a freak accident to me, until a few weeks ago when I was driving with my kids to my sister’s house. We were headed through the center of bustling Pittsville, Maryland, and I was a little distracted by the sign that my sister and her husband had hung on the building where they will soon be opening a new restaurant. When my eyes returned to the road, I saw a dump truck careening toward me up on two wheels. I swung my car way out to the right, certain that some part of the truck or whatever was inside it was about to come bouncing through my windshield or down onto my roof. Fortunately, somehow the truck managed to right itself and sped away, leaving me a shivering mess on the side of the road. Unlike so many people, I had actually had a chance to consider this manner of death, since I had read about the other two women. But that didn’t make the moments of uncertainty any less traumatic or make me any more prepared for what could have happened.

Spc. Bandhold was a guy who a few years ago was working at a casino in Portugal and going home every night to his wife and kids, and suddenly he was a guy facing explosion in the desert. Every other soldier there must have a similar story, and be living a life that he/she couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Even as I sit in the safety of our home, the potential disasters, diseases, and attackers are lurking out there. I wish we could all be like the guy in the movie Big Fish, and declare “This is not how I go” to stop the unthinkable from happening. However, I guess the only thing I can do now is ignore the potential for death and go on with life. And I will take some comfort in the fact that the odds are pretty good now that a dump truck will not come close to tipping over on me again.

(My apologies to Sister Petra if the Latin is wrong.)

Internet Connections

When we moved to Kentucky we met a nice couple across the street with two cute, all-American looking kids. As is often the case with Army neighborhoods, since the ages of our kids did not match – mine were little, hers were in school – and since they were often away for the weekend visiting their extended families, we would wave to one another, but we never really tried to become friends. I knew my daughter would love to get to know them better since they had a huge wooden play structure in the backyard, but she had to settle for the playground down the street where we could come and go as we pleased without worrying about bigger kids stepping on her. The husband half of the couple worked in the same office as my husband, so occasionally we would hear news about them or their kids, things that were especially good or especially bad, but usually unless we drove by and waved, I didn’t really think about them.

One day the HP came home from work and said our neighbor across the street was going to be sent to Kuwait for a year, much as the HP has now been sent overseas for a year. I felt bad for the wife, bad for the kids, but I knew their families were nearby and at the time, pre-9/11, we didn’t really think there was must danger involved. As it turns out, we were wrong, but the danger was not in Kuwait, it was at home. While the neighbor husband was gone, I was pregnant with my son and I would wander the house at all hours, unable to sleep because I had developed a debilitating allergy to the state of Kentucky. I would often stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window to see if any one else in the neighborhood was up or had a light on, if anyone else was stressed out or unable to breathe like me. More often than not, when I looked toward the neighbor’s house across the street, I would see the familiar glow of the blue TV screen. I would think how sad and lonely she must be, how she must have trouble sleeping while her husband is away just like I do.

How naïve I was. When her husband returned home from Kuwait, there was a great flurry of activity with moving trucks and relatives and other people coming and going. My husband finally ran into the neighbor husband and asked him if he was moving or had been reassigned. That was when the neighbor informed us that the day he arrived home from Kuwait his wife had taken the kids and left him for someone she met online while he was away. He had no inkling that any of this was going on, and like him I also felt completely duped. Here I was wasting my pumped up, hair trigger, pregnancy sympathy on her, thinking she was groggily watching Happy Days reruns to pass the time, and really she was looking for love online. The blue screen that glowed through their window at all hours was not the TV at all, but the computer. I still find it hard to fathom that sort of betrayal (of her husband that is, after I had the baby and came down off the hormones I realized that she wasn’t really trying to hurt my feelings). Forget the fact that meeting people online can be rather sketchy, particularly if you have small children, but if you are married to someone and so unhappy that you want to leave him or her, I think the polite thing to do would be to mention it before the moving van rolls up to the door.

And yet, now that my husband is away, here I sit at the computer night after night, writing these little essays and sometimes reading other people’s blogs (depending on how late it gets while I’m trying to push myself to 1500). We have plenty of neighbors, some of them pregnant, who may look out their windows and see the blue glow of this screen through the cracks in my mini-blinds. Are they more suspicious than I was, or would they just think it was the TV the way I did?

I would never be one for sitting in on a chat room since it takes me a long time to compose my thoughts and since the whole idea of chat rooms sort of creeps me out. Obviously I am not sitting here looking for love, but I suppose I am sitting here seeking a connection, even if it is just to an imaginary audience. I envision that someone will read a sentence in something I’ve written and think “that’s pretty funny” or “that’s pretty pathetic.” I don’t really care what the reaction is; I just like to think that I am causing one

Earlier this year I read the book Gilead which I would describe as a great book, but since it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, that seems a bit unnecessary. Unfortunately, I gave my copy of it to my mother, so I can’t quote it exactly (which might be an argument for putting off this little dissertation until I get it back, but I’ll just fix it later), but it is a story of an older minister who is dying, and the book is basically a long letter that he is writing to his young son. I won’t go into the plot details here, although I may write a book report on it someday, but at one point the narrator says something along the lines of: when you are writing you are never alone, because your reader is always there with you. I feel that way to. I know when I write these things I am talking to someone out there, and that makes me feel connected even though the reader might be someone I’ll never meet. In a way, that is a perfect situation for me. I’ve got friends and family all over the place that check in with me regularly to make sure everything is going well here on the homefront. I’m glad to talk to all of them, but since I spend all of my time in a house with 3 small kids, I am not exactly full of captivating anecdotes of my fascinating life. My conversations with my sisters usually go on for a while and then end with the phrase “I’ve got nothing,” nothing new to report, nothing interesting to say, nothing more to add. I can’t exactly trap the well wishers on the phone and give them the story of every street I’ve ever lived on, but I can put it out here.

Reading other people’s blogs is more confusing to me. I don’t know if I should be checking back a couple times a week to read what is going on in the lives of people I don’t know. I am always looking for something to read since I have all of this time on my hands in the evenings (I usually blow through my magazines the day they arrive) so when I find a blog of someone who is interesting and funny (even when he or she is ranting), I find myself eagerly waiting for more. But more often I find myself adding blogs to my list of favorites only to later delete them when the blogger turns out to be more egomaniacal, offensive, pathetic, depressing, or boring than I had initially thought. I feel a little bit like I am turning my back on them, since I had become one of their listeners, one of the people that they were talking to when they wrote. But really, other people are not writing for me, they are writing for any readers that are out there and I’m sure there are plenty who don’t react the way I do. I have not set out to deliberately bore people, and hope that readers will move on when they find I am irritating them.

Given this discussion about my own motivations for going online, I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about my neighbor in Kentucky. Maybe she was just trying to find a friend online, and maybe she would have left her husband with or without a boyfriend waiting in the wings. Maybe her husband was a big psycho, we really didn’t know them. Maybe if she hadn’t found someone to talk to online she would have felt trapped in her life and gone crazy. Probably she was just an immature loser with time on her hands who found the attention from strangers exciting. She is a perfect case study for the argument that, for better or for worse, the internet is the place you can always find someone to relate to, whether you are the most bizarre sort of pervert or just a lonely woman at the keyboard with nothing else to do.

Life on the Homefront - What A Great Day for a Mow

When the HP departed for Afghanistan, he left behind the three chores that have been his sole responsibility since we were married – taking out the trash, cleaning the fish tank, and taking care of the yard. Obviously, when he was away on a trip or late coming home, I would occasionally put out the trash, and although I have never cleaned our fish tank, I vaguely remember helping my brother with it once or twice when I was younger. But the one thing I have never done is operate lawn keeping equipment. I know some women LOVE to mow the lawn for the exercise, but I don’t need exercise that badly. What I do need is to have one aspect of keeping house that is not my responsibility, that the HP wouldn’t dare ask me to do, that I can ignore even when it looks terrible, because it is not my problem. I am fairly mechanically inclined and I am not afraid of machinery, but I have remained willfully ignorant when it comes to landscaping accoutrement. I will rake leaves, I will shovel snow, I will even weed the garden, but I will not under any circumstances mow the lawn, until now.

When we were kids, my parents held an unwaveringly sexist view of dividing the household chores. The girls had to set and clear the table, do the dishes, vacuum, sort laundry, and basically undergo the sort of training that a 1930s housewife might have found useful. My brothers were responsible for two things: the lawn and the trash. My parents would probably have let me mow the lawn if I had insisted, but that would not have meant that my brothers would take over the dishes for a week. I would merely have been adding to my list of chores and subtracting from my brothers’. (Let me note here that my parents were not the sort of people against educating girls or who planned to keep us under lock and key until they arranged a suitable marriage. Apparently their plan was more along the lines of producing independent and well-educated career women who made excellent housewives as well.) Although Mrs. Neary, the widow next door to my parents, mowed her own miniscule lawn with one of those manual mowers with the rotating blade (and I can still hear the sound of that blade spinning), no other women in the neighborhood ever mowed grass, especially my mother. I know this because I have a distinct memory of one of my father’s extended business trips during what must have been a very rainy season in Washington, when my brothers were too young to operate the mower. The grass in our yard got so long that my best friend Kerry and I could pretend we were the girls from Little House on the Prairie, reenacting the famous opening scene where they run in slow motion through the field of tall grass.

When the HP and I were first married, we lived in an apartment with no landscaping responsibilities. Later we moved to a townhouse which had a lawn about as big as a dining room table, and although I probably could have groomed it with a pair of safety scissors, I took my stand and turned the “lawn” over to the man of the house. He bought the cheapest mower on the market – one step up from the mower Mrs. Neary had. About every month or so he would spend 15 minutes mowing the grass, usually not even bothering with the backyard since no one could see it and we never went out there. He had it pretty good until we moved to Kentucky, where our lawn was so huge we could have kept a family of cows grazing indefinitely. We were the only house on our end of the block, and everything as far as the eye could see was our responsibility to maintain. Clearly, the mower from the townhouse was not built to control such a lawn, but the HP resisted replacing it with the lame argument that we might next move back to a place with a little lawn. I let this go for a while, but soon mowing the grass became a 3 to 4 hour chore, and I would find myself stuck with the kids from the time the HP left for work until it was time for them to go to bed. Some super mommies may be able to handle this, but I can only take my kids until about 6:00 pm, and then I must get away from them (these days I turn on the TV, judge me if you must but at least I haven’t bundled them up and left them on the side of the highway). So in a valiant effort to reclaim some of my sanity, the HP finally went out and got a big self-propelled mower that cut the lawn maintenance time in half.

The HP regaled me with tales of the wonderful new mower, how easy it was to push, how fun cutting the grass was now. However, I had read Tom Sawyer and I saw right through his attempt to foist the lawn onto me. I cheerfully delivered cold drinks to him while he worked, and then I ran back to the safety of the air conditioning, but now I have nowhere to run. The HP had planned to give me a little lesson on all of the lawn equipment before he left, but it was never a priority since it was already almost winter. After he left though, I decided that I’d better learn how to use the leaf blower for three reasons. One, we have a car port (that’s right a car port) where leaves tend to collect, and while I could probably rake them out, no one really enjoys the sound of a metal rake repeatedly scraping concrete. Two, our housing area is overpopulated with pin oaks that drop teeny narrow leaves (the size of small feathers) that resist raking. Three, the wife of the commanding general here must have slipped on some leaves once, because now by order of the post command, every last little leaf must be hunted down and subdued into a clear plastic lawn and leaf bag.

At my request, the HP called and provided me with very clear detailed instructions on how to operate the leaf blower, and I was able to get it started without any problems. What he did not provide for me was a strategy for moving the leaves from their snug corner of the car port to the grass outside where I could get them into a bag. Imagine the scene if you will, when I fired up the blower, waded into a pile of leaves, and immediately turned the carport into my own personal snow globe. Leaves were swirling all around me and flying through the air, as I stood there like an idiot with the blower firing away. Of course I started to laugh which made my aim even worse and the cyclone of leaves even crazier, and I can only imagine what any random neighbor strolling by might have thought. Hoping to regain my composure, I took my machinery into the back yard where huge mounds of leaves had blown up against the back of the house. I managed to blow them along the house into an even bigger pile stuck behind a bush and the air conditioning unit. In a last attempt to salvage some use out of the stupid thing, I took it over to the little fenced drying yard (that’s right, I said drying yard) where more leaves had piled up, but after blowing them from a manageable pile into a strung out mess, I gave up, returned the blower to the shed and found my rusty rake.

I have only ventured into the shed since then to find holiday decorations or a cooler or to retrieve a tool from the HP’s tool coffin. However, when I returned home from spring break this week, the lawn had taken on a life of its own and if not for the kids’ bikes in the car port, the neighbors might have thought our house was abandoned. As a kid, I never understood why my dad thought clover and violets and buttercups in the lawn were such a bad thing – after all, clover was still green and the flowers were pretty. Unfortunately, now I realize that they are in fact weeds that can get quite tall and shaggy when left to their own devices. The tallest weeds in the lawn were probably 18 inches high, although the most prevalent were some things with purple flowers and teeny little leaves that went around and around their stalk. I knew that unless a kid knocked on the door that evening and offered to do it, I was going to have to mow the lawn myself. So I emailed the HP and he called the next day with instructions for starting the mower. I was not intimidated about starting it, since I’d had such success with the leaf blower, but as soon as I pulled the mower out of the shed, I was in trouble. I couldn’t find the little button that I was supposed to push to prime the engine so that I could start it. I looked everywhere I thought it might be, but couldn’t find it, so I went to look for the manual, but I couldn’t find the manual, so I went online to look at the manual, but the online lawnmower manual said to look at the engine manual to find out how to operate the engine.

I suppose at this point a normal person might have sought out a neighbor for help, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I knew they would think I was an idiot, and even if I went and got my analytical chemistry notebook from college and showed them how I could diagram the optics of an infrared spectrometer, they would have to tell the other neighbors that I was a dumb girl who didn’t know how to start the mower. Instead I got a pencil and went out and copied down every name and number on the stinking engine, and then plugged it all into Google to see what came up. The picture of the Briggs and Stratton engine that came up had a bright red button on it, and next to the button in bright red rather stylized letters were the words “PUSH 3X TO PRIME.” I knew there was no such thing on our mower, but I went out to look again, and sure enough on the front of the mower engine were the bright red words and the bright red button. In my defense, I never considered looking on the front for the button to prime the engine, because the only thing I know that needs to be started from the front are those cars with the engine cranks that the Waltons used to drive around. Anyway, I pushed the button as directed, pulled back the safety on the handle, yanked the pull string, and nothing happened. I had pretty much reached the end of my rope with the mower, but I figured I would add gas to it, and try one more time. Unfortunately we have two red plastic fuel cans in our shed, one for the blower and one for the mower. I couldn’t see into them, so I thought maybe I’d give them a quick sniff and see which one smelled more like a gas station. Then I was afraid that the neighbors might think I was so distraught over the separation from my husband that I had taken up huffing. In the end I just picked the can that looked older (since the mower is older than the blower) and dumped it in. This time after I primed the engine and pulled the string, the stupid thing finally started.

Our side yard is comprised of 30% weeds, 40% dirt, and 30% rocks, sticks, and debris. When I ran the mower over it, I couldn’t tell where I had mowed and where I hadn’t because I was so distracted by the alarming sounds of debris pinging around down in the mower blades. I went up and down and side to side on the yard, and even attempted the incredible shrinking square technique that the HP favors, but I’m sure it was obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. Every time the noise of nongrass items inside the mower got loud, I would turn and go the other way. After a while I decided that it looked as good as it was ever going to, and moved on to the front yard. The front yard is comprised of 95% weeds and 5% debris. We also have trees, a lamp post, metal access plates, and other obstacles that make a straight mowing grid rather impossible to follow. However, the weeds were so high I was able to determine where I had mowed and where I hadn’t, and when I was done, I thought it looked pretty good. In fact, I probably mowed it with a thoroughness that no man in the neighborhood would have bothered with, since I didn’t want any man in the neighborhood scoffing at my lawn.

Our back yard is composed of 75% dirt and debris, 20% moss, and 5% little weed patches. The weed patches are not close to the house, but I can see them out the back windows, growing taller and waving to me. Clearly after my experience with the frightening sounds of the side yard, I will not be taking the mower back there to tame the little weeds. What the back yard needs is a weed wacker, and we just happen to have one. All I need to do is figure out how to detach the blower from its engine and exchange it for the weed wacker attachment. If I send a quick email to the HP, he will no doubt provide me with the detailed instructions I need to accomplish the switch. One of these days I will, and I’ll let you know how that goes. For now, however, I think I will just keep the blinds closed in the back windows and instead look out the front window at my well groomed lawn and the trees whose leaves are just beginning to sprout and are months away from falling.

My Philosophies on Parenting and Zacarias Moussaoui

When my first daughter was little and I was trying to figure out what was involved with starting her on solid food, almost no one that I asked for advice could remember how to do it. There must be procedures for turning your kid from a milk junkie to someone who enjoys all kinds of foods, but unfortunately this sort of knowledge is lost almost as soon as it’s gained. I could never remember from one kid to the next exactly what I had done, and neither could any of the other mothers that I know. Once you get the kids through the cereals and the jars, and once they have a few teeth and better hand eye coordination, you never know exactly what they’ve got in their mouth because they are always helping themselves to your food, their sibling’s food, and on unfortunate occasions, their pet’s food. I do remember one conversation that I had with my mom about feeding kids, during which she said she was determined not to have food become a power struggle the way it had been in her family when she was a kid. We did not have the “clean plate club” and we were never forced to eat huge mounds of food we hated. We were forced to choke down one asparagus every Easter, but other than that, my mom didn’t bother serving food that she knew no one wanted. I guess we were reasonably diverse, if not particularly adventurous eaters, and none of us developed any nutrition-related diseases, so we must have been eating well enough.

My kids have reputations as picky eaters but I think they are getting a raw deal. They eat a lot of different stuff, it just has to be plain – no condiments, no cheese, no tomato sauce, no seasoning except for salt (as much as they can get away with). Unlike a lot of kids, they will eat almost any vegetable, but I have no idea why. I certainly have no words of wisdom on the matter other than the Gerber advice to keep serving the stuff over and over and eventually they’ll start to like it. The only other reason I can think of is that, like my mom, I never fight with them over their meals. I will threaten that they will not have a treat if they don’t eat enough dinner, but I don’t serve food they hate and then make them eat it. Why don’t I do this? Because I don’t want to hand over huge portions of my life to arguing with them about anything while they are still young enough to view me as a rock star.

All the baby books will tell you that after love, safety, and regular meals kiddies want two things: attention and control, and they will take them any way they can get them. When I have somewhere to go, I always leave early so I don’t have to hurry the kids along. Kids are supposed to stop and look at bugs, pick dandelions, teeter along curbs, and attempt to hop on one foot all the way to the car. If I have to hurry, I have just handed control of my life to three little connivers who at any moment can go limp and drop to the ground or take off and run to the top of the playground. If I yell and take the kids by the arm (gently, of course) passersby may suspect that I am a bad mother. However, if I am really late and need to grab them before they run and wrestle them into the car, passersby may suspect that I am one of those Irish travelers who abuse their kids in the walmart parking lot. Similarly, other than requiring that their attire match the weather and occasion, I let my kids pick their own clothes. Clothes that I find particularly ugly or worn out disappear while the kids are at school and usually the kids will forget about them.

So I guess my parental philosophy is, generally speaking, don’t hand the power over to the kids. A little preemptive action can keep things happier around the house – by serving what they like I avoid a daily argument over what and how much they are going to eat; by leaving early I let the kids control the pace of our comings and goings and avoid having to say “Hurry up please! Hurry up please!;” by removing the bad clothes I let the kids control what they wear without having to fight over what I don’t want to see. And what, any of you who have stuck with me this long may ask, what does any of this all have to do with Zacarias Moussaoui?

Here are a few words to describe Zacarias Moussaoui: coward, moron, failure, dumb ass. Even in the training camps of al qaeda he must be used as an example of all the things you should not be doing when trying to become a bad ass terrorist. He would like to think of himself as a conspirator and stand shoulder to shoulder with the other psychos that managed to complete their disgusting plan, but he is not, he is an idiot. He has not managed to inflict any damage on any one other than himself due to the fact that he is a bumbling, deranged, pathetic loser. Above all else, old Zachy is powerless. He sits in a jail cell with no glorious record of striking against “the great satan.” None of his al qaeda buddies have staged a Robin Hood type rescue for him. Much to his chagrin, he is powerless to prevent his family and his defense lawyers from spending day after day putting forth theories of his troubled childhood and mental illness to demonstrate that even before he bungled his way into jail he was powerless to become a threat to anyone other than himself and I guess anyone who was forced to endure a conversation with him.

So what are we doing? Why are we taking this zero and handing him the power to hurt people? My philosophy on Zachy is, generally speaking, don't hand the power over to the failed terrorist. I know that this is America and everyone gets their day in court, but if we really want to punish him, no one should be attending his days in court. No one should be reporting on his days in court. When he gets up to take the stand, the people in the gallery should hold up newspapers like college basketball fans sometimes do when the other team is introduced. If the media wasn’t there to replay the crap he is spewing, do you really think he’d bother? Osama probably would not have given him another thought once he was arrested, but now he can scream and rant and get daddy’s attention because we have handed control to him. Why are we expecting him to listen thoughtfully to the pain of the poor families who lost their loved ones? The moment that his lawyers asked him what he thought about the destruction of 9/11, he finally had a weapon to swing at the families who have already been victimized once.

I don’t know the reasons that some of the families decided to testify, though I am sure they all had important ones. Maybe some thought they should do anything they could to help get any al qaeda member executed as a measure of vengeance for the ones they love. Maybe some went there to go on record with their pain, to make sure their story and the memory of their loved ones is preserved for the future. But I can’t help but think that some of them went there hoping to see some flicker of remorse, some sign that beneath the façade of this raving wannabee menace is a human being who might feel the smallest bit of relief that he was not involved with the destruction, or the least bit of understanding that the victims of 9/11 were not “the great satan” but regular people who went to work and loved their families. I hope I am wrong, but I’m probably not. Victims and their families speak to criminals all the time, and often the criminal, powerless now even to turn away from what he doesn’t want to hear, will take the weapon he’s given – hope - and use it to bash his victims one last time.

Now that Zachy has caused all of the pain that he can with his big mouth, pain that he was unable to inflict as a human bomb, we should send him off to Supermax with the Unabomber to live out his days in a little cell. However, we will more than likely hand him one more chance to wield power, power that he never could have achieved as a free man left to his own devices. When he is executed, this marginal, malfunctioning, misfit will become a martyr, revered among the fanatics as a great hero of al qaeda. He will inspire more dimwits with no other prospects to take up the cause of Zachy, avenge his murder at the hands of the great satan, and take their places along side him with the 40 virgins and all that other crap they are promised for being mass murderers. I know I am out of step when it comes to the death penalty, and I know that most of America wants him to fry for what he’s done (or meant to do), but I would rather see him come to a unexciting, pathetic end that is more in keeping with his useless life. However, if we must execute him, I believe we should do it with a ham sandwich sitting on his lap, so that at least he won’t get the virgins up there in psycho heaven.