Note: The following was published this week in my free weekly e-mail newsletter, a-clue.com.

I headed out last week to see Dr. King, but I was feeling so frisky when I approached that his ghost motioned me northward instead, toward the steep, short hills around Peachtree Center.

Exhausted, I pulled in to a sidewalk, and entered a brick garden lined with benches. I sat heavily onto one, and as my breath returned looked to see a backpack, or perhaps a bedroll, on the bench opposite me. Quite suddenly I started, and recognized where I sat. Here was where the bomb went off during the 1996 Olympics. It sat there, maybe on that bench, in a pack much like the one I was facing.

Did I feel lucky? I walked a few paces north and found a street person, smoking a cigarette and talking to herself. The bedroll was hers, I concluded, but I was no Richard Jewell (left, from the Augusta Chronicle). I would not report it, could not be a hero. The space where the streetperson sat held short monuments, stones etched with names. These weren't the bomb's victims, I saw, but the winners of every medal at those Games, in order of their event, from athletics to wrestling. Gold, silver, bronze, immortal.

But it was the bombing, which killed Alice Hawthorn and wounded dozens more (many of whom are still in court over it) through which history still defines those Games. Most of the Games' heroes are forgotten. The villain's act lives in infamy.

That bomb, of course, was just a small precursor to the horrors of 9/11 and the further horrors of the "War On Terror" which has no end. Eric Rudolph (right, from CNN) stands accused of the crime, but he is in fact being tried for another bombing, in Birmingham. Did he have accomplices? No one knows. But if one man, perhaps with some little help, could do so much damage, destroy a great event's joy, destroy a whole city's reputation, what hope does civilization have against the larger conspiracies loosed by hate upon the world?

I finally understood. We can't protect everyone, everything, all the time. It can't be done. Civilization, like the Internet, can only survive if there is a consensus to keep its peace. Some won't follow that consensus, but unless we do everything possible to keep those numbers small, very small, they will still overwhelm us.

If the history of our time, from that bombing onward, should teach us anything, it is that. And if we don't reach consensus based on that understanding, the war in which we're engaged cannot be won.

So I rode on, lost in thought. One bullet killed Dr. King. One bomb killed the Atlanta Olympics. One conspiracy destroyed the World Trade Center. The Earth consists of 6 billion possible conspirators, each with their own mind, minds that no government - not even the most brutal - can hope to control. When I arrived home, Dr. King asked me, what are you going to do about it?

Tell you, I answered.