Volume IV, Issue XXX
The 'other' weekly news magazine this week features the cover: "How Guns Won." Joe Klein concludes that the debate over gun control has gotten out of control. Indeed, the rush of some journalists to blame Second Amendment advocates and talk radio hosts was ill-timed. A nation needs time to simply mourn and process the unthinkable when it happens.
Unfortunately, unthinkable events have been the recurring nightmare of history. Genocides and enslavements are nothing new. Sadly there has been no evolution out of such horror. In fact, the great reengineered societys such as Socialist Russia, built on the promise of eliminating the horror, created their own unspeakable horrors. While the National Socialists in Germany were killing millions, Stalin's Russia was killing millions as well. Because Hitler lost, we saw the horrible pictures of his atrocities. Stalin's often went unreported, but for millions of Ukranians, were they any less real?
Yet, in the face of every horror, heroes emerged. The 'Righteous Gentiles' who hid their neighbors in Holland during the occupation remain part of our history as well. Now we see the faces of the men who died shielding their wives and girlfriends in Aurora. We think of a time forty years ago when a brave weightlifter blocked a door as he tried in vain to keep terrorists out of the Israeli Olympic quarters.
On Monda, April 16, 2007, Holocaust survivor Dr. Liviu Librescu was teaching his students at Virginia Tech. As a gunman tried to break into the room, Dr. Librescu blocked the door and told his students to jump out of the windows. Dr. Librescu sucessfully held the door shut as bullets ripped through his body. His quick thinking saved many lives, but he died in the process.
Into every period of history, those who answered man's basest instincts were opposed by those who answered to a higher authority... aspired to a loftier mountaintop. This issue of THYME is dedicated to their memory.
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