Grassy Knoll, Redux

I haven't latched onto any one of the conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, 2001. I haven't researched & blogged about these theories, like this one, until today.

"We would like to know what happened," he said. "Four-and-a-half years later, we still don't have definitive proof that a plane hit that building."

Maybe I should support an idea like this one. Yes, I could really believe that controlled explosive detonations leveled the Trade Center Towers after I watched the second plane fly into the second tower on live TV. I suppose it could have been not-live TV & that the government send subliminal messages out the night before on the TV to prime me for this great fool-the-rubes extravaganza. I would be amiss if I didn't mention how it was a Jewish conspiracy.

I'm not sure why I don't agree with these theories. I guess all I can say is that I find them particularly dopey. Maybe that's too harsh. How about goofy? I would also add that I have pledged to be reality-based. &, to me, that means not blaming the Jews, the gays, the lesbians, the Democrats, the pornographers - both new & old, & last but not least, the Venusians.

& yet, when confronted by credible reports about a massacre in Iraq, we are instructed to wait for the military to give us the facts. Go figure.

Here's something to think about.

The My Lai Peace Park

To some, it may simply
look like
we're back with our do-gooding
done-bad
stuff
intentions paving the
road to fixed-up clinics, and
shrimp farms in exchange
for husbands and babies
or papas,
loan funds that
revolve
like the wheel of life
no prayer flags
however just
fluttering contrition
and shame to pluck at freely
growing
like the kapok tree
dispensing its white gauze balls,
sopping soul blood
from the green wound
memorial
curled along the fringed-pine fence
row;
but until we all look
over the fragile
crumbling edges of bloody ditches
into the fleshy truth
of hot, chopped
bodies
we cannot buy our way out;
we must own the horror,
all of us
who turned away our faces
when we heard
and didn t even cry.
There is no far away
from My Lai.

Constance Lee Menefee