I do not ever want to reach a state where I become desensitized to an act of beheading a human being.  Should that ever happen then the terrorists will have won and we will have surrendered our liberties to those who live by the sword.

Acts of terrorism shock us in the beginning because such acts are beyond our personal experience.  Certainly, we can imagine seeing such acts in a fictional setting in either a movie theater or on television where we are watching from a safe distance.  We know it is not real.   

Yet when the unthinkable happens everything is thrown into confusion.  We will never look at an airplane or a skyscraper the same ever again.  We have been hit in the gut and are trying to regain our breath.  Some of us adapt to the circumstances.  Those that do know that the world is and always has been a dangerous place and now that danger is that much more acute.  But these people are able to live their lives.  They don’t forget the transgressions but they are also not overcome by them.

But there are also some people who are so overwhelmed by what has happened they have no way of coping with it.  Such people isolate themselves from the world and put their heads under their covers in the hope they will wake up from a bad dream.

Of course, there are other people with certain world views who try to convince themselves what they have just seen is fiction.  That the event is somehow staged to fool the world.  Convincing oneself that something is fiction is for some easier to accept than truth.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a column concerning the beheading of Nicholas Berg.  The scenario I just described played itself in some of the responses I received.  Several people wrote me and insisted that the CIA killed Berg.  One person went as far to suggest that Berg was actually killed inside Abu Ghraib prison by private contractors and not by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda.

Why is it that some people cannot simply accept that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar?  Why must every event be so much more than what it actually is?  Why can’t these people accept the fact that al Qaeda’s mission is to kill non-Muslims, especially American Jews?  Why must these people be willing to believe the worst about the country in which they live?   Do they honestly think their rantings will somehow persuade the terrorists to leave us alone?

Meanwhile, the family of Paul C. Johnson, Jr, who was beheaded by al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi Arabia last week, have no one with whom to celebrate Father’s Day.  For that I offer his family my deepest sympathy.   

I can only hope that in a few days hence I will not start to receive letters insisting that Johnson’s beheading, like Berg before him, was nothing more than an act staged by the Americans in order to mobilize support for the War on Terror.  But yet I fully expect this to happen.  This is what happens when people have their heads in the sand.

Aaron Goldstein, a former member of the socialist New Democratic Party, writes poetry and has a chapbook titled Oysters and the Newborn Child: Melancholy and Dead Musicians. His poetry can be viewed on www.poetsforthewar.org.