Aedin Mc Loughlin

Were they different, those men?
Were they simply figures of death,
caricatures sent on the wings of death to haunt our dreams?
For our dreams are surely haunted by those Valkyries of today,
riding their winged instruments of fire and destruction.
Did they not have wives, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers?

Were they so different, those men?
I cannot think they were,
did not bear the same genes, minds and hearts as we do.
Could it be that they were simply us in another time, another guise?
Which of us does not carry those feelings that make us capable
of doing what anyone else does?
Do we not in us somewhere have the fanatic, the hater, the vengeful, the mad?
We are all those madmen who gladly went to their death for a cause,
taking thousands with them.
We are all.
For they were men. Only men. Not aliens, devils, monsters.
Men in the same mode as we are.

And tomorrow there will be other men intent on doing exactly the same thing.
Only this time it will be called retaliation, justice, lawful, heroism.
And the world will watch as tall buildings fall in flames and laugh,
just as others laughed,
because it is them, not us who are dying,
burning, buried in rubble, mourned by their loved ones.

But we are men.
And they are monsters.
Us
And them
Forever -
Us
And them.

Oh, Jesus, what price now the blood you spilt?
Prince of peace in whose name men kill, where is your kingdom now?

In Posse: Potentially, might be ...