Did you complacent people out there know that there's a war on?

That people are being killed?

And how could I have forgotten that there's a war going on? Well, I'm being scolded for precisely that -- and today's Inquirer woke me up to the hard reality I've been avoiding:

Has the war finally hit home? While the headline certainly did, the problem is that I didn't want this war to start. I can't say I was doing just fine, but up until September 11, 2001, the war really hadn't hit home, and I really didn't want it to. Sure, over the years I'd watched the emergence of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the American hostage crisis in Tehran, the emergence of Hezbollah and Hamas, the assassination of peacemaker Anwar Sadat, the Beirut barracks bombing, the killing of American peacekeepers in Somalia, the first World Trade Center bombing, al-Qaida's declaration of war on America, the Khobar Towers bombing, the African embassy bombings, the U.S.S. Cole, but until the planes struck the towers on September 11, it just didn't quite feel as if the war had really hit home.

On that day, the long, cruel war finally hit home for me. I'll never forget it.

So what exactly was the purpose of today's newspaper headline?

To tell me what I already knew?

If I didn't know any better, I'd almost swear that today's headline was more along the lines of "antiwar movement hits home."

I'm probably being hypersensitive, though, because the stuff I read on the Internet doesn't hit home with as much of an impact. (I guess that's because it doesn't hit my driveway with a thud.)

UPDATE: Watching CBS's "Tribute to Fallen Heroes" (the premise of which was that "another soldier had died in an ambush and that he was too young to die") blogger C.R. Mountjoy found Bob Schieffer's presentation to be "over-sentimentalized," "overly melodramatic," and "lugubrious."

Is there a war between facts and emotions?

Anyone know who's winning?