I was five minutes away - were you ok too?

First there was a red-hot fire-engine trying to make its way in, wailing its useless, unheeded lament in the absolute jam of outer circle in the rush-hour. The there was the ambulance, a mere five minutes later and a mere two hundred yards away, swinging smoothly out an eerily deserted inner circle to take its place in the same unmoving wake, crying its cry of urgency against the immovable, obdurate force of too many people encased in too much metal crushed into too narrow a space to allow for manoeuvring. We work so hard to encase ourselves in skins progressively more impervious in degrees - to insulate ourselves from this unbearable environment that we have created and now cannot endure.
The questions begin to be asked yet again. As they have been with increasing urgency for the past few years. And yet, no matter how insistently, vociferously or unanimously put, these questions fail to do what any good questions should - they fail, time and time again, even when answered accurately, to solve the problem. Perhaps, then, we are asking the wrong questions. The question is always, once the initial shock fades - and the shock fades faster each time this happens; we really are becoming quite inured to the idea of private, borderless warfare - a very loud and bloodthirsty 'Who?'
Once the shock fades and reaction sets in, we need some fingers pointed, and we need them pointed quick. The idea of an invisible threat, like the idea of an invisible anything, always hits too close to the bone - the human animal is too used to relying on its ability to see to function. Its telling that we can only make our absolute Authority so completely and unshakeably scary by making it unseeable - why do only invisible gods flourish?
But the real question, the one we are prevented from asking by years of conditioned, ingrained prejudice and instant offensive reactions to insecurity, is the one that would send up a collective wail of dismay out to the far reaches of the universe should the entire population of this planet one day, just for a minute, stop and ask it of themselves: 'why?'
I think the earth would implode under the weight of that collective sorrow, despair and disappointment - the disillusioning moment of agonizing, blinding SIGHT when we take away all the filters and really look at ourselves and our self-important little world.
'Is the goverment too soft on terrorism' a poll immediately asks. That makes no sense to me. When you strip away the layers of emotion both those words have been carefully swaddled in before being presented to us - so that you feel instantly reassured by the one and threatened by the other - don't they mean the same thing? An attempt at coercing the will of someone else through a show of force. Is not the line we are made to endure to get a drivers licence or a passport merely for the dubious pleasure of getting from point a to point b ('which of course we are completely free to do whenever we wish') a form of bending us to a will other than ours by the occasional discreet flexing of a muscle or two that serves to remind us of everything we might risk by disagreeing?
So what's the difference? Oh, that's right, we didn't elect the terrorists through due process, free and fair and completely transparent.
But someone did.

"Those bloody pakis", a friend said on the phone. "SIMI" and "Taliban" were also tossed around. My mother and I, on the other hand, can't decide whether it was the government or the opposition. I thought the latter, and was immediately made to feel like a conspiracy nut. Thank god for my mum, bless her heart, who called a couple of hours later and without hesitation said 'it's the goverment'.
If there's anything that warms the cockles of the hearts of us conspiracy types, it's a nut nuttier than we are.