If you're expecting me to make light somehow of the activities of the past week, forget it. I believe that you can find humour in almost everything. In most cases, even black humour is a mechanism to deal with grief and pain. But I can't find a single shred of humour in the wholesale slaughter of innocents. I don't find humour in the Holocaust, in Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine, the Vietnam war, the massacres …showed first 75 words of 1002 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1002 total…of justice. Why? Because we are better than savages, and due process is a central tenet of our deeply-held series of shared beliefs. So let's back-off on the cowboy rhetoric and remember that Tuesday's victims died in an attack not on property, but on those values we hold dear. If we abandon our ethics for a quick-fix response in white-hot anger, then the terrorists will have done more damage than they ever hoped to achieve.