It might be lack of sleep or one emotional shock after another experienced in a succession too rapid for processing.  The world has taken on a dreamy quality similar to that hazy state of being between consciousness and unconsciousness.  I fall back 60+ years and images of my home state and what it was like at that time, the cars, Muriel X with the ration cards and the endless logs of trying to make their slim finances stretch, not ever having enough money and yet being part of a community where no one was well compensated for anything they did and they still continued to do it because everyone believed it was honorable.

I wonder who is a model of how to behave during a world war, how to mount a citizen's response, a citizen's resistance.

There is so much talk about this long war and who to bomb and  what is crucial to understand about the enemy but no one talks about how we're supposed to live through this.  Maybe we will all become like Israelis who today were at the beach even though in the north the war rages on.  The pizza shop bombers and bus bombers become part of life.  I suppose dirty bombs and chem attacks could be commonplace as well as we press forward into a tenuous future while half of us live in denial and blame whatever convenient public figure is available for all the things going wrongs, the high gas prices, the resultant higher food and clothing costs as if any one person could wield so much power, that it's the war, stupid, the Jihad, stupid.

I wonder how long we can maintain the illusion that we are not at war, that war is a construct of the Bush administration and if only the Rethuglicans can be removed from office it's free pot and beer for everyone.

What was the winter of 1941 like.  What was the weather like on December 7?  People sat frozen at their radios as FDR addressed the nation.  Was it frozen outside?  What was Christmas like that year?  Did people that day think it was going to be a long war?  This war already is longer.  We're losing our patience with it.  We long for the commercial break and the announcements of new programming.

What would WWII have been like if we could have seen the Dresden bombing.  What would it have been like if instead of Adnan Hajj we had Dieter Kohl taking pictures of happy workers at Buchenwald.  "Smile Jewish pigs or you die.  Wave for the stupid Americans, this will be in the New York Times next week, Walter Duranty will see to it."  And the stupid Americans would see the Jews at the spa camp in the mountains, so thin because they are recovering from TB receiving treatment from the finest of German doctors and hate the Jews even more because most Americans in rural areas couldn't afford to go to mountain spas and receive free medical treatment from a beneficient government.

Would Americans in those days watching the war on TV as we do, propaganda tool that it is, wonder why we were fighting the Germans.  The Japanese yes a case could be made for fighting them, but the Germans?  Even Lucky Lindy didn't want to go to war.

War is the result of not working at diplomacy harder.  Everyone can be tempted, there is something everyone wants.  It just a matter of someone like Dennis Ross finding out what it is and giving it to them.

What Dennis Ross and the rest of us don't realize is that what they want is to destroy us.  Not even the Nazis wanted the entire world.