It's hard not to wince with pain at not only the week's tragedies but the prospect of further violence and turmoil.

And it's hard to find any good, any solace, through these times.

Yet they are there, I've experienced them, some very thoughtful articles and posts have emerged and kind words said by DU members.

Thank you.

It was a hard week on DU.

by watching something even worse last night: Terror at the Mall

Great documentary about the Nairobi massacre, yet quite difficult to watch...

I was in that mall, had lunch there while visiting my daughter. I felt very, very uneasy there and sensed it would be a target at some time.

are two places which became sites of terror attacks that I had spent a fair amount of time in the 90s. It definitely brings the threat closer to home when one is familiar with the setting of an attack.

But in answer to the OP, I just returned from a very inspirational UU service, which manages to be intellectually stimulating and spiritually uplifting in equal measure and simultaneously. Elsewhere, I can find one or the other separately, but the UU Fellowship is the best place I know to find them together. Wise and healing remarks about Paris were part of the sermon. This was something of an antidote to the polarizing rhetoric we've seen here and throughout the blogosphere in the past week.

and that is what makes it so real. I will try to watch the movie at some point.

I am so glad that you had a good service. I briefly attended a UU church in New Orleans. I am not a morning person, though, and things that occur before noon are hard for me to get to unless I have to. I remember going to church a few times after 9/11. I wanted to be among people and silently share the grief. It was a healing experience and, as you describe, an antidote.

I know it's not anything that can be used to warn anyone, but I would be curious how many other people felt that leading up to the tragedy.

The documentary relies heavily on security camera footage, most of which is in color and records far more frames than we often see in the US. The rest is made up of excellent interviews with the victims that lived, including several of the five policemen that went in (along with two licensed-to-be-armed civilians.) Those seven people are shown to be the big heroes of the event as they got out most of the people still alive, and found the ones that had been shot and got help to them.

However, the footage does show people getting shot multiple times as the terrorist go around making sure people are dead. Some of the things you hear in the interviews are as chilling as the footage, if not more so.

I will admit that as much as I refuse to rubberneck when there's an accident on the road, some things like this documentary just draw me in. It is a highly compelling 65 minutes, even with the horror of the event and killings going on. Maybe because I feel such a strong compassion for them that I want to be there helping them, even if it's long gone in the past.

The documentary also shows how inept the SWAT and military forces were compared to the extreme bravery of those policemen and several civilians.

It is very upscale and full of people who are visiting or working in Nairobi, but not necessarily Kenyan. It's a very shiny object in a very dark place.

I will try to see it at some point.

are having a much much much worse time than we are. sometimes it's best to just put your head down and let stuff slide when people are this upset.

Bryant

painting, watching ceramics videos and reading a trashy novel.

I finally read some of the threads in LBN today, and found myself wondering if reaction here would have been different had Geert Wilders been the victim.

if any of the people we're supposed to hate had been the victims. There would have been a reaction to the loss of life, but not the support for them to do what they do.

I think, too, that it was a direct attack on the press that whipped things up into such a frenzy here. However, I don't feel most members on this site would have reacted similarly if the ones attacked had been (or associated with) Fox News. Their "freedom of the press" would have been dismissed as unimportant or unworthy of protection/protest.


So, will the content of that trashy novel influence what you end up painting?