10:59 am I am trying not to think right now. to just shut off the pictures, the soundbites, the images that keep running through my head like an end-of-the-world movie. this can not be real. yet it is. I feel as though I have no words, but something, something needs to come out. there isn�t a place in me where I can file this, where I can make sense of it. my generation has seen nothing like this. ever. the everyday routine of things seems so pointless, so meaningless. I wonder what I can do, how I can make it better, how anyone can make it better. but this isn�t a bandaid-and-a-kiss situation. I am horrified, yet so very thankful. saddened, yet still trying to find a grain of good in this heap of evil. I can�t. I can only imagine how much worse this is for people in new york, for people in DC, for people with friends and family who are missing, who were flying. I can only imagine how this scene, this attack that is so foreign in the US, mirrors the type of violence people around the country live with every day. I have only a glimpse, a distanced TV view of the horrors, the atrocities. I try, but can not imagine the reality. what I can do is simply watch, try to battle the racial war that is now bubbling up just below the surface, fill up my tank with gas before it�s $5 a gallon, tell my family and friends that I love them, pray. what I can do is combat the urge for people to blame every arab-looking man or woman they see, the urge for people to hate, to target and to fear people who are no more at fault than any of the rest of us. what I can do is hope that we, as a country and as a united nation world-wide, will respond to this gigantic wake-up call, and I don�t mean by dropping bombs on countries in the middle east. we�re not invincible. we�re not immune. and we�re not going to merely walk through life without thinking about what a great gift it really is any more.