aimless and i ended up in a campus bookstore, posing as patronizers in order to steal some air conditioning. between daoism and crass comics i found one three-foot shelf labeled "Middle Eastern." it's funny how the books made my hands hungry.

i grabbed handfuls of them, scanning page after page. and each page was filled with recountings of pain: whole families murdered, sisters raped, children starving, neighbors beaten to death, bombings, executions, injustice, cruelty...you've heard the stories too, i'm sure. how can one people survive and inflict that much pain? the names, changed to protected individuals, varied, but the theme did not.

the radio was playing an angry country song, one of the many about 9/11: "have you forgotten/how it felt that day/ to have your homeland under fire/and your people blown away..."

i felt a vague feeling of dichotomy: holding in my hands the voices of millions whose not only homelands, but villages, livelihood, husbands and children are "under fire" everyday and listening to the righteous wrath of one indescribably horrible event. one day of pain, in contrast to the lives of pain, as it was for their ancestors. as it will be for their children, and their children's children.

"the man with smiling eyes stopped smiling to say: 'until you speak arabic you cannot understand pain'." was inconguent or is it just that all people believe the affects of the fallen world to be original to their lives?