:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 4.14.2011 ::
:: "18 years after Waco, Davidians believe Koresh was God" ::
By Ashley Fantz, CNN
April 14, 2011 9:23 a.m. EDT
Waco, Texas -- Sheila Martin's children burned alive. God, she says, wanted it that way.
"I don't expect you to understand," she says, leaning her bird-tiny frame against a full shopping cart in the nursery aisle at a Super Walmart. Her pink shirt, flats and purse match the lilies, hydrangeas and clusters of jasmine she's buying.
"Oh, look, they have forget-me-nots!" She caresses the blue petals and, like a child, puts her nose in the plant and inhales.
"These will be perfect for the memorial."
On Tuesday, Martin and a handful of other surviving Branch Davidians will gather at a hotel off a freeway in this dusty Central Texas town to remember the federal siege on their religious compound, an event that has become synonymous with the word Waco.
On that day in 1993, a 51-day standoff between the armed Davidians and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended in a fire and the deaths of at least 76 people. Among them were Martin's husband and four of her children.
In the garden center, Martin nervously picks up her pace, examining each plant, smelling and touching their blooms, kneading the soil.
The memories have sharpened each year, not dulled as she had hoped.
"I just don't like to go back," she says.
For days on end, grenades went flash-bang, she says, hurting her ears like nails shot into her temples. The kids were screaming, running down the hallway outside their bedrooms when the first shots were fired on February 28.
Bullets hit the walls. They went through the walls. One shattered her bedroom window and zinged over her 6-year-old Daniel's head. She looked up. His face was bleeding, cut from flying shards of glass.
Her 4-year-old, Kimi, was crying. The roar of the helicopters over the building sounded to her like war.
She touches her chest. She still feels the vibration in her ribs from that blaring, awful music the FBI pumped on loud speakers, trying to drive them out.
Her calm, over those days, came when she heard his voice, talking to a negotiator, on the loudspeaker.
"Now, do you know what the name Koresh means?" the voice boomed.
"It means death." [Who was David Koresh?]
"We didn't have a plan for death," Martin says.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 12:30:00 PM [+] ::
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