STATION LOG

Benjamin Sisko, Commanding Deep Space Nine

I watch the footage from Earth for the seventieth time today, and I am still silent as it unfolds. Casually, the Breen fighter alights onto the bottom of the cadet transport. Admiralty Tower is gone in a heartbeat. It falls down, breaking up and causing still more damage as it goes.

Tractor beams tear the Golden Gate to ribbons. Long, deadly ribbons that drag across the city before being released almost five kilometers above. This attack was not unplanned.

My old exobiology professor is shown leading Cadets out, just in time. But then, he's from Starfleet's first family, a group of dogged survivors from the time the Federation was founded. Someday, I'll have to show him the padd his uncle signed. Someday. But not this day.

We can't punish ourselves for being an open society. The Dominion are using The Breen as a battering ram, and Cardassia as a staging ground. I have to wonder if those Cardassians who cheered Dukat's signing of the Alliance Treaty as yet understand what's coming. Because while we will opt for the most life-affirming solution, we will also do what we have to, short of escalating to trilithium warfare. I hope they don't think this will merely be another strafing run, to be waited out. The ones who will pay the worst will be those that neither cheered nor spoke up.

The Founders must live in a cozy mental world. All their wrongs, set aside. All our actions, wrongs by definition. If we so much as lift a finger to defend ourselves, we are villains.

Our mindset is different. We know ourselves, warts and all. We don't want to breed people merely to die, hurling themselves at today's chosen foe. We have problems. We have injustices. We have major blind spots. We are slow to act, and often fuzzy when we do. On the other extreme, we too often give in to the instinct that has some among us invoking trilithium warfare, or pricking every finger, looking for shapeshifters.

But we also try not to breed the built-in misery of so-called ordered societies. When intelligence told us the Jem'Hadar were wiping out every last residual trace of the miniscule remains of The Old Cardassian Trading Consortium, I was not surprised. The Founders apparently were, though. Seems they underestimated the devotion they demanded from those they lathered up.

So it is that we will pay this atrocity back, in a manner strong enough to voice our anger, but restrained enough to ensure that our galaxy remains livable. We want and will have our revenge. Even if the Dominion forces survive as fugitive thugs, pecking at us and then running away, their miserable lives are about to become a lot more miserable. And eventually, we will penetrate the mindset of death and more death with the credo of life and respect for same. Our hands won't be clean at that time, any more than they are now. We won't expect that our sins can be just washed away quite that easily.

As a culture, we have the great and sadly almost unique gift of total self-awareness, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses. We will gladly surrender neither aspect, merely to avenge a wound, or erase a scar, however deep and horrid those become.

That is why we endure.
 
 

9/11/2001 - Remember