This post is not funny. You have been warned.

It's been some time since I was interested in ruminating on the events of five years ago yesterday. But 9/11 went by again, and I work in a skyscraper and travel by the second most used light rail system in the country. I realized quickly that the chances of avoiding unhappy thoughts was slim yesterday morning and then as I rode home, slim dwindled well past sickly.

You simply don't work where I work and travel the way I travel and not get visions of off-course jetliners piloted by men of suicidal conviction who know of nowhere to land other than the 40th floor of my building. And don't forget that God is their co-pilot. On the train it's the specter of the proverbial 'unattended package' placed by men and/or women who look strangely like everyone else. It's hard not to feel like a target, except that these people seem to lack that personal specificity that one typically finds in something like a serial killer. Most mass-murder/suicides aim for quantity over quality. On 9/11/01, they got both.

I heard only one 9/11 reference at work yesterday. My colleagues were far more concerned about timely and tasty catering orders, quasi-functional printers and strict budget lines. The train was full of seemingly unconcerned commuters and if there's a bit of extra tension, it is far more likely to be my hyperactive imagination at work than any nervousness brought on by the ghosts of New York, Madrid and London. But what wasn't said was louder than words. And no one was sleeping on the train yesterday.

It was hard to check headlines today during my lunch break. I just wanted to find some last-minute dirt on today's iPod announcement, but the mainstream media and even the usually saner alternative news outlets were screeching resolved stoicism and lessons learned to the masses while reserving prideful protectionism for those that suffered real losses. I cringe at the falseness of the former but can hardly begrudge the latter their real pain. I wish them peace and speed in their healing processes.

I often reflect on the varying rations of rationality that have been allotted to the cultures of the world and wonder how much longer we will willingly suffer murderous irrationality to remain among us. But I fear that now - five years on - we are no closer to real answers about how to affect change. Pathological irrationality is hard to combat; it sows confusion among its enemies and makes it hard to find an entry point to rational discourse. Many feel we should fight this new totalitarian fascism that extreme Islam represents on a literal battleground. Last I checked it wasn't really working out that well for anyone involved. A try at diplomacy would represent that rational discourse I mentioned earlier and that's not really working out either. How does one begin a level-headed, worldwide conversation when people on all sides of the argument are often guided by books that essentially tell them to give no quarter to the enemy because their ideas are false and so they are 'enemies of the faith'?

Maybe militaristic metaphors are clouding the issue. Maybe a softer ideological approach is better. But it's too optimistic to think that we can simply boil away the vitriol and render a new world from the remaining soup of surviving ideas.

This diatribe is in danger of becoming circular like a round trip on the Blue Line. So for now, I'm getting off.