“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”…Edmund Burke

September 11, 2001. On the day the earth stood still our phone rang at 8:21 am. It was my friend (and our ex-drummer) Marcelo Palomino calling to tell us that the World Trade Centre had been bombed, as well as the Pentagon. Mick and I were half asleep so everything was a bit of a blur until we turned on the television and saw the devastation for ourselves. Reality hit, but the images didn’t seem real. It looked likes scenes from a movie. New York City was a big black and grey cloud of death, but this was no fucking Hollywood movie. The beautiful Manhattan skyline had been forever changed and so had the lives of every American. My eyes couldn’t believe what they were seeing even after hours had passed. Some say that courage is just fear that has said its prayers. Even all this time later as I write this, I can tell you that I have said my prayers, many prayers. Prayers for the victims and prayers for the survivors. Prayers for my country. My prayers are silent, but they’re louder than my screams could ever hope to be. I have cried while listening to the endless stories and body counts. It is not a weakness to hurt or to cry it is a human emotion and while 4,970 people are still missing our nation is still crying. After watching the scenes of hundreds of Emergency Services search and rescue teams, fire fighters, police officers and volunteer citizens (some of who were tragically killed themselves in the process) going through mass heaps of heavy metal while listening for a murmur, scratch or thump of someone possibly still breathing beneath the horror I have realized that we have just experienced something so terrible there are not even words to truly describe how I feel. The videos of this fateful day’s events have left us with images that will forever be burned into our collective retinas. A wounded numbness. Watching so many people plummeting to their deaths from the doom is one of the things I will never forget. It doesn’t matter that I did not know a single person directly involved in the attack because we are all directly involved and affected as Americans. We were not attacked by a superpower but by spineless pieces of shit who use religion as a weapon and commit murder in the name of God. These people knew they could take lives and sadly, it’s easy to take lives. The ultimate goal of these terrorists is to cripple the US so severely that they could deteriorate and destroy our way of life. It was designed to scare the hell out of us and break the spirit of our country. Well it succeeded in scaring us, but it will not break us. Freedom is not a four-letter word, but ‘HATE’ is. These people hate us because we are free. We are being warned that these terrorists may strike again with more suicide bombings or something more intense like biological warfare, so as we stand together as a United Nation and try to help one another heal this horrible hurt we must also remember that we must fight to protect the way of life we have worked so hard to make possible. We have been told to go back to business as usual, but the truth is that it feels so insignificant to be rehearsing for our upcoming shows when our armies are rehearsing for what might possible be World War III. We are a strong people, but we need to be honest about what happened. This is not going to go away and it might possibly get even worse. Our physiological skin tries to help protect us, but right now we have a gaping wound and genuine fear. God Bless America…land of the free and home of the brave. I feel for the Afghan people who are suffering under the Taliban regime. I hurt for the women who are treated as less than human by men who claim to be holier than thou. While America is focusing on the rage of the situation, we haven’t forgotten the pain or the grief that the families and friends of the victims are still experiencing. As we are threatened with a Holy War or ‘jihad’, the US has no better friend than Great Britain and no greater enemy than Osama bin Laden. Evil often triumphs but it never conquers. Unchecked it grows, tolerated, it poisons the whole system. As for the rest of the world…they’re either with or against us, and if they’re against us, that means they’re with terrorism. My thoughts and prayers are with all Americans all over the world and with those who are no longer with us. New York has become a burial ground for thousands and a memory for millions of what evil really is. America is not the great Satan. He’s in a cave claiming to be God-like and although he’s keeping himself well hidden (as cowards often do), we will walk through that valley of the shadow of death until we find him. And we will fear no evil because we are angry, we are strong and we are still the baddest motherfuckers in the valley! Home and away. LOVE TAIRRIE B.

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