Last Tuesday was a beautiful day in Kansas City. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the temperature was in the mid seventies. It was to be a special day celebrating the Kansas City Royals World Series victory over the New York Mets in five games. A parade had been planned to welcome the champions home that would wind from downtown to the Union Station. It was a parade that the metropolitan area of Kansas City has seldom seen in its history. It was a day that would, for all practical purposes, shut down the city.
Earlier that morning my wife and I had traveled to St. Luke's Hospital located just off of The Plaza District in Kansas City. She was to have some tests done on her heart that would take most of the day. The majority of that time would be spent in a hospital room resting and recovering from the test before we went home to be sure that there were no complications from the test.
The room that they assigned to her was room 401. This room looked out over Broadway at about 41st Street. As the morning progressed we started watching coverage of the parade on a local television station. They started coverage early in the morning even though the parade itself was not scheduled to begin until after noon. While watching the crowds begin to gather down at Union Station, she feel asleep and so I walked over to look out the window onto Broadway.
As I stood there looking out the window I started to notice people walking up Broadway towards the point where the parade would find it's end and the players would give speeches to the crowd. It wasn't a large flow of people however the street was never empty of people taking the three mile walk to the Union Station. They were ordinary people with one thing in common. Blue t-shirts. Every person walking up Broadway had a royal blue t-shirt with some celebratory writing on the front of the shirts. As time passed, the flow of people in blue began to grow. Eventually it was a constant flow of fans hiking up the short hill. As the crowd increased, the inevitable bizarre people began to show up every now and then.
STOP .... TOPIC CHANGE.
I was in the middle of describing how the Royals fans showed up at Union Station in droves to celebrate the World Series victory. About my observations of the different people walking miles to the parade. I stopped to finish later and now something has happened on the world stage.
Paris, France went under attack by terrorist believed to be from the ISIS organization. Innocent Parisians murdered in cold blood outside a soccer stadium, inside a packed hall attending a rock concert. Over 150 dead as I write this and the French are taking military action dropping bombs on Syria. In a way, it is 9-11 for France.
There will be no fingerpointing at political leaders here. Just a call for nations to finally pull together, go all in, to try to stop these terrorist attacks that have been a constant on the western world. It is time to put away all political differences between nations. It is time for each nation to protect their people while at the same time joining together to try to make life safer for the innocents.
It aches to see this kind of senseless killing. It hurt on 9-11, it hurt to see in Kenya, it hurt to see London buses blown to bits, it hurt to see trains in Spain destroyed and it hurt to see at the Boston Marathon. It is time to band together to end this.
I ask politicians not to use this as a political tool to advance agendas. I ask political leaders throughout NATO and the rest of the world to come together and fight this scourge that has inflicted our lives since the 1993 WTC bombing. It is going to only get worse if these groups are allowed to get stronger without any overwhelming retaliation from the world community to stop it.
Something needs to be done. Now is the time to do it.
Prayers and thoughts for
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