Lisa and I left Schiphol Airport to return to the US the end of May. We took this picture. Amsterdam, like it's Airport is a beautiful, non threatening place now indirectly the center of the world's attention because of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, that took off from this place with 298 souls of which it is estimated 80 were children. Headed to Kuala Lampur. About three hours in and somewhere over Ukraine a Surface to Air Missle fired by some improbable Ukranian russian sympathizer who never in his wildest imagination thought he would be a mass murderer of men, women and children. And of course he has stepped up to take responsibility. (Not the sardonic tone) I've flown out of Boston Logan since as well. And like thousands of others, in the back of my mind knowing that that Airport was implicated in the 911 disaster. When 911 actually occurred, Lisa and I had been vacationing. I returned from Hawaii on September 10th. Lisa had planned on staying a few more days and of course that turned into another harrowing week due to the grounding of all commercial flights. Of note, only the week prior she had stood on top of one of the Twin Towers during a visit to NYC. Several years later and after another vacation, we returned from Italy landing at JFK in late October, 2010, which turned out to be the same time that another plot had been uncovered involving cargo planes that had explosives intercepted on a plane due for Newark. We were curious where all the security came from at JFK and why. So we have had kind of a different experience during these events. This time though haunts me. This is different enough to cause me to spend some time going over our route from Amsterdam to see if we had also flown over the Ukraine coming back to the US. You know kind of wondering if for the grace of God go we thing. We hadn't, our route took us several hundred miles East. But we have spent enough time in these aircraft and I can't imagine. The instantaneous horror they experienced before oblivion. I suspect it was mercifully quick. But the enormity of this disaster at the same time that Israel invades Gaza? The world just seems to be heating up at a compounding pace, don't you think?
But it's not the first time. As I moved into a different stage of life (getting older) I became an avid reader of News and Politics. Issues that ten years ago I was clueless of or really didn't give a hoot, I now have pretty rigid opinions of. And I'm not the only one as I've noticed most of my peers also seem equally engaged and/or equally opinionated. But the issue to me and the one I am most fearful of is not that the world is heating up as I said, but do we now have the caliber of leaders who will prevent what this mess could eventually become. I listened the other night to a politician casually recommending "limited use of Nukes". Yes the world has indeed heated up in the past but there were leaders who not only met the problem head on, but also retained the presence of mind to avoid Armageddon. The ability to successfully work out diplomatic resolutions that assuaged the problem prior to going to war. Following the Cuban Missle Crises there were enough events and concessions made to indicate that in that dire period, we were probably a lot farther away from total annihilation than we thought. It appears that the standoff was solved more through diplomacy rather than the nose to nose first one to blink kind of mthod. If the same thing happens today, I want to know will cooler heads prevail or will there be the same drumbeat to war that we saw with Iraq. Will there be a media campaign to convince us that using Nukes isn't really that bad? Scary stuff. That's what I lose sleep about.
While we were waiting Lisa took this little video showing for an Airport, it was quite tranquil . Birds chirping, flowers blooming and people going about their business.
Mike n' Lisa's quest blog UA-20271220-1 ga(‘set’, ‘&uid’, {{USER_ID}}); // Set the user ID using signed-in user_id.
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