Borderline disorders

Abstract

There are all too many victims of violence. A woman walking peacefully in New York City is felled by a psychopath wielding a brick. A baby in LA is slain by a stray bullet from yet another drive-by. On a crowded bus in Sri Lanka a bomb explodes, blowing passengers to bits. Palestinian and Israeli children continue to be maimed in a war instigated by great-grandfathers. Christians are slaughtered in Indonesia, enslaved in the Sudan. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics assassinate one another, despite a peace accord. Muslims are pursued by Hindu mobs in India, killed by tanks in Chechnya, while Iraq and Iran slaughtered tens of thousands in brutal border wars. Villagers in West Africa lose limbs to the machetes of adolescent renegades and diamond smugglers. Hutus butcher Tutsis in Rwanda, while Tutsis murder Hutus in Burundi. Serbs, Albanians, Bosnians, Croatians rape, torture, and slaughter one another’s innocents. Ethnic hatred, racism, religious intolerance, and the fetid fervor of righteous fury feed the violence. Where are the peacemakers? Who will heed them? Civil wars and drug wars, religious wars and wars of ideology chie y victimize civilian populations, easy prey too ignorant or frail to resist. From Central to South America, across the continent of Africa, throughout the shifting sands of the Middle East, pervading the emerging nations of far eastern Europe and central Asia, and extending to the most remote islands of the Indian Ocean or the South PaciŽ c, hatred relentlessly seeks its victims. Terror on the streets, terror across the globe—brutalizing, maiming, debilitating terror—cripples generations and whole nations awash with bloodied memories. The expanding waves of violence reach ever more distant shores. Middle-Eastern terrorists blaspheming the name of Allah have hijacked passenger planes in the United States. Using civil aircraft as cruise missiles, they murdered and disabled thousands of victims from vastly different nationalities, destroying American cathedrals of commerce and assaulting its Pentagon of military might. Incinerated bodies falling from the sky made cityscapes into crematoria, reminiscent of the ashes from the rosy plague centuries