LAST SATURDAY, a Guyanese family in New York participated in a church outing on the Hudson River. As members of the excursion party admired the impressive landscape and pointed out the twin towers of the World Trade Center to their young children, the minister of the church began reading from the 37th verse, Chapter 23 of the Gospel of St Matthew, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” To the astonishment of the gathering, the minister invited them to read the verse of scripture with him, but substituting the words `New York’ for Jerusalem.

One wife and mother recalled mentally asking herself what could have prompted the minister to intone such a disturbing verse of scripture in the middle of an outing on the Hudson. Two days after the disastrous events of Tuesday, September 11, that church member replayed the incident in her mind and came to the conclusion that her pastor must have been burdened with a vision of the coming devastation, to have sounded so prophetic. And everyone viewing the aftermath of the horrific incidents of last Tuesday would surely find the other words of St Matthew pertinent: “Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.”

The daring and diabolical plan to hijack a number of American aircraft and to use them to dive-bomb selected targets that are symbols of American power must have been hatched in the bowels of hell.

Even the stunned survivors of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, and the millions of world viewers could not imagine the extent of the destruction and the high cost in human lives that the attacks would wreak. Manhattan streets are lined with crushed and torched motor vehicles, tons of glass shards and fragments of concrete, bits and pieces of material and miles of twisted steel rods and frames. According to the experts, the buildings collapsed because steel frames were melted in the inferno created by the aviation fuel.

As business houses and stock firms begin the process of calculating their stupendous loss in both human and material terms, the brave rescue teams put their own lives at risk by working patiently and diligently through the mountains of rubble plucking bodies and body parts and then labelling them for identification.

And the stories of near-miraculous deliverance are awe-inspiring. Telephone traffic between Guyana and the United States is at an all-time high as persons seek out and reassure loved ones of their safety. In those instances where family members and friends have not been located, or are suspected to have been casualties of the disasters, there are calls among groups, kin and siblings to support and comfort one another.

The rest of the world waits nervously as the number of dead and missing rises, confident in the knowledge that the American reaction to this `eye-pass’ and outrage will be furious and lethal. There will be no surgical strikes as obtained in the Gulf War over a decade ago, or in the bombing of Belgrade in the late 1990s. The unfortunate aspect of such indiscriminate military action is that the innocent will pay with their lives while the crafty perpetrators disappear from view.

An old adage says, “It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good”, and in a wry twist of circumstance, the process of rebuilding structures after this tragedy might very well be the impetus to reverse the downturn in the American economy and usher in a new era of prosperity. An abomination of desolation may yet be transformed into a cornucopia of wealth.