reading the syracuse post-standard on my porch in skaneateles with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an unexpected morning off:

state trooper shootings shake up the community, suspect found dead “in the wreckage of a house destroyed by a towering fire after a police raided it [sic] Wednesday evening.” Cause of fire unknown. “I cannot tell you whether he was dead or alive when the fire started.” … an art student who makes mock meth labs and pipe bombs and then displays them on end tables or inside teddy bears to provoke thought on the everyday nature of their components runs into trouble with his university public safety division … Stephen Hawking gets a complimentary ride today on a commercial “zero-gravity” flight, expects weightlessness to be “bliss” … a drunk German man is found sleeping in the foyer of his bank at 4:15 am with his horse standing nearby - “Aside from an undesirable deposit made by the horse inside the building, the man - who has an account at the bank - had not breached any bank rules.” … a man in a Captain America costume was arrested for disorderly conduct after groping a woman during a costumed bar crawl - “Several patrons who had also dressed as Captain America were asked to step outside so the woman could identify the suspect.” … the veracity of the civilian death toll in Iraq, as reported by Iraqi officials, is questioned … the House passes an Oct. 1 pullout start date by 10 votes but a veto is expected if it passes the Senate … the Dow breaks records … the country grapples with the VT shootings … the death penalty is proposed in NY state for killing law enforcement officers … a one paragraph nod to a Harvard professor with a new book on terrorism that includes the advice: “Addressing the demands of terrorists should not always be dismissed as appeasement.” …

I stare at the lake and marvel at how we take so much comfort in our ability to scoff and tell people to grow up as we hurry past the headlines and flip to the sudoku.

I think we don’t want to admit that our lives are becoming a daily devotional to a series of gimmicks that we hope will keep the pane of glass between us and the enemy opaque enough that we can pretend we never even knew it was there.

We don’t want to think about what causes other people’s glass to break because we’re afraid that if we make eye contact it will sweep across the room, kiss us on both cheeks, and greet us by our first name while asking about the kids and the dog.

The enemy is not terrorism. It is desperation. And we all know its face.