And the reaction in America?

Oh, maybe a few of us read the papers this morning, murmured some vague tsk, tsk, then turned the page to something less . . . distasteful.

Our administration, so full of big talk about justice and supporting oppressed peoples of the world when bullets aren’t flying, quietly averts its eyes says nothing, does nothing.

. . . exactly like the diners at Tavern on the Green in Ghostbusters.

As I predicted.

Human nature is a bitch ain’t it?

The Ghostbusters scene is striking precisely because it depicts reality in an unreal situation – an imaginary garden with a real toad in it, so to speak. The reality is in depicting how most people actually react when someone else is in danger but they feel safe where they are. There is a seemingly endless string of examples of this very behavior among individuals and among nations.

So you have my opinion. What’s yours? Can you suggest a more likely outcome? Or are you just intellectualizing the obvious – that there is “a whole spectrum of possibilities” without offering your opinion of which one you think is most likely – if not the one I suggest.

Whether that was your intention or not, you are doing a good job of depicting the worst possible scenario, and if cynicism was the only force at play, the inevitable one.

But a cynical analysis does not cover the whole spectrum of possibilies.

Oh, I think about the same thing as happened in Ghostbusters – when the Rick Moranis character, pursued by one of the minions of Gozer, fled across CPW to Tavern on the Green.

His screaming and rapping on the windows attracted the bored attention of the diners. But then, when he was dragged away from the windows by the beast, all the heads turned back to the tables and their dinner companions, and the conversation resumed where it had left off.