The Fires of Amon Din

Sometimes we can never be sure. The world is a big place, and even the smallest village in the remotest deserts of Arabia has currents and tides too complex and too numerous to reduce to an article, or an essay, or even a large tome. The dangers of miscategorization and misinterpretation rise as our attention and our patience fall, until we find ourselves battling for one soundbite over another when both may be dangerously wrong, or, more often, both inadequately right.

September 11, if it did anything, broadened our attentions and enlargened our world. We had fooled ourselves into nonchalance, willingly hypnotized by the coziness of a predictability that wasn't, but our circumscribed lives never really existed, not in the way we thought. There was a blackness in the wilderness that we had chosen to ignore, until one fateful day it stepped into the light to spark a fire of its own. By this terrible new flame we saw that the danger, through our inattentiveness, had grown and multiplied. Darkness was everywhere, yet we knew what we had to do.

The enemy cannot be defined by what he is, for his mutations and permutations are many; instead, it is much easier to understand what he is not. I look around at the decency of our lives and the economy of our people; I gaze in awe at the prosperity and happiness that liberty and hope afford, and the enemy becomes very clear. We are in a fight with darkness itself, and darkness can only be known by its relationship to the light.