I am very sad today. I did not make a big, public show of it, but it's there underneath.

Preparing to bring a kid into this world, the news of those monsters in the UK today affected me profoundly. Once again, it reminded me that we are living in a world of tremendous wonder, seen through the lens of tremendous hate.

The 24 (and counting) savages nabbed in London today send a clear message to the world: we are never completely safe anymore, at any time. The enormity of what these monsters were planning will be lost in the human sloth that rises out of avoiding tragedy.

It's like avoiding a car accident. "Whew," we tell ourselves, "that was close." And we go about our merry way. We tell a story to our friends of how close we came to having the ultimate bad day. Then we pick up and move on, and make ourselves blissfully unaware of our surroundings until we narrowly avoid tragedy again - or possibly don't avoid it.

After 1993, we all blinded ourselves (most of us did) to the terror unfolding in the world. Since it did not succeed, we overlooked and ignored that the plan, in 1993, was to use those car bombs to topple the World Trade Center. Our memories faded, we forgot those that lost their lives, and evil went back to the drawing board.

In 1998, al Qaeda issued a fatwa declaring war on the Western world, and coordinated the destruction of US embassies in Africa. But what did we care? We were in the middle of the false economic boom of the late 1990s, spurred on by dot-coms that most of us believed would be tremendous cash cows for all time.

In 2001, we were shocked and appalled that people wanted to kill themselves, all for the opportunity to cause as much death and despair as possible for the price of a plane ticket. We were shocked because we had forgotten about their earlier acts.

All other politics aside, have you really thought about that? Have you really thought about that we live in a world where, for the sake of hatred and spite, someone is willing to take a plane filled with couples, children, the elderly and the hopeful - and end their lives, for what amounts to nothing? What will their act accomplish, besides death? There are no demands attached - merely the desire to see their "enemies" dead at any cost.

Children are among their enemies, by virtue of not being born like them.

Religion is not behind these people's motivations, except as a thin pretext toward programming. I am not talking about the foot-soldier. The poor and the hopeless are willing to let their religion be a fulcrum by which they are turned. I am talking about the commander, the terrorist leader.

Their motivation is power. They want the power they see in this world for their own. They want to be at the top of the pecking order, masters of all they see, modern-day Alexanders weeping for they have no more worlds to conquer. They will use and kill anyone they can to get it.

There is one leader in specific who wants to see the chaos throughout the world because his religious leaders tell him it will bring the 12th Imam to the world and that man will lead his faith to complete dominance over everyone. He runs Iran, and he wants nuclear materials.

The comfort of the Cold War was that, though a war of ideology, there was a humanity. We had the weapons, but not the will, to kill everyone out of spite. No one ever thought that it would be a worthwhile solution to say, "Screw it - if I can't have the world, no one can."

But we avoided tragedy today. So we will say, "Well, gosh, we avoided that by the skin of our teeth." We will carry on. We will forget, because we have short memories. We do not think of 1993 anymore. It's a footnote. We do not remember 1998, except for a show we saw that year that was really funny.

We fail to honor the dead, who died to teach us a lesson in 1993, in 1998, on September 11 - that we need to be ever-vigilant. Not just the government. We the people.

I am very sad today, because my child will have to live in this world of hate. He or she will have to know that just because they were born American, someone wants to kill them.