I had this horrible dream-- a nightmare. I dreamed that tall buildings in New York City were hit by passenger airliners and brought down in an explosion. Huge balloons of orange fire exploded from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The towers collapsed as if they were made of sand. Thousands of people died. A third airliner plowed into the Pentagon. Hundreds more lost their lives. CNN covered it all.

I am still living this nightmare. I am hoping at any moment to wake up. Even as I write this, I would like to awaken to discover the tall towers standing, acres of glass and steel glinting in the sun, the Pentagon intact, and all those people alive and well.

But I have not awakened. I know all too well as I write this, that the destruction of three airliners full of people, the wreckage of the twin towers and the Pentagon and the deaths of more than six thousand people was not the kind of nightmare that ends with sunrise and a cup of coffee.
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And my nightmare--3,000 miles from the scene--must be nothing compared to the nightmares of the survivors, the families, the rescue workers, the fire fighters and all New Yorkers. They are living it, up close.

So where do we go from here? Talk radio chatter tends to favor those who would bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age. As if Afghanistan weren’t already in the stone age. The ruling Taliban is a group of insane clerics who oppress women and harbor suicidal mass murderers. Afghanistan is ruled by people who belong in straitjackets and rubber rooms. You can’t reason with people like that. And how would massive firepower and thousands of tons of bombs do any good? It didn’t work in Vietnam.

Americans are wearing red, white and blue ribbons on their clothes at work, apparently as talismans announcing their support for war, or retaliation, or patriotism, or something And I notice Google and CNN and other media outlets are using similar twisted tricolor ribbons, the kind you might pin on your shirt. That ribbon seems to have become the logo for this event. Pepsi has a logo. Microsoft has a logo. In America, we have logos for everything, even disasters.

And then there are the flags. They’re everywhere, many at half-staff, in honor of the victims. But other flags not at half staff, decorate porches, freeways, autos. What are the messages of those flags? The message is unclear or ambiguous. People attach flags to their gas-gulping SUVs, apparently oblivious to the fact that those same vehicles increase our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

And what was the message sent to us by those madmen piloting our civilian airliners against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Beyond the message of pure, white-hot hate, it is unclear what they were saying and why. Where was this hate spawned? What gave birth to it?

It’s uncertain who the enemy is or where he is. The enemy seems to be a deadly philosophy based on a religion. Can you kill a philosophy? Can you fight a war against insanity? How do you win against an enemy who believes death will take him to Paradise?? Can a war on terrorism ever come to an end?

I wish I knew the answers. I am not hearing the answers on CNN or CSPAN. I am not hearing the answers out of Washington.
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Russ Nichols is a writer and teacher in Los Angeles