Voices stilled. So many voices stilled.

    Oh, Lordy, there shouldn't be any New York voices in my head. I live in another country, in a tiny log cabin nestled in the woods. And yet � I hear New York voices.

    Gingi, Party Girl, Riot, and Mystie � New York voices. I've been listening to these voices for quite a while now, and the thought that any one of them might be stilled by an unimaginable act of apocalyptic cruelty hurt in a way that startled me.

    On this continent, we have been largely spared the great leaps that have been made in the technology of killing during this last century. We sent our warriors off to die on foreign soil.

    We were shielded from the "collateral damage" that comes from war--from the deaths of average people going about normal lives who happened to be in the sort of place that for one reason or another becomes a target.

    It appears those days are done.

    There are pivotal moments, moments when innocence is lost, and somehow you always remember where you were when they happened.

    I was sitting at a small wooden desk at Sprucedale Public School in Chatham, Ontario the day that my tearful principal announced over the scratchy school intercom that John F. Kennedy had been shot.

    I was a student in Ottawa, Ontario standing on Parliament Hill when I learned that my government had declared the War Measures Act and blithely stripped every Canadian of their civil rights.

    And today I was standing in a small gym in Vermont watching in horrified silence as symbols of American financial power and military might went up in smoke.

    Welcome to the new millenium, folks. You might want to fasten your seatbelts, it looks to be a bumpy ride.