I'd like to talk to Osama bin Laden. Send him videos of people talking about everyday life. Just mail them to Pakistan with an odd confidence that they'd wind up in his possession. Why not? He's not going anywhere. His life must be hell.

He's on my mind a lot, anyway. Whenever I think of evil embodiments, there he is, seven years after the most abhorrent, senseless eradication of innocent human lives ever packed into a few hours.

Some of Hitler's atrocities may have rivaled 9/11 numbers in a similar time frame, but the Holocaust, thank God, was never televised (couldn't have been then, of course). Ironically, if a little of it had been, maybe a lot of it wouldn't have happened.

There may be single battles, a few from our own Civil War and certainly the World Wars, that rival those awful numbers, but those involved opponents in wars. Both sides knew they were engaged in warfare, and killing was a matter of self-preservation.

Not even Pearl Harbor claimed as many lives, and even that horrendously evil, cowardly sneak attack was aimed at military forces.

But I digress. Since I was a child, Hitler's was the face I saw in my mind's eye whenever I thought of hideous evil on Earth directly and by design causing unfathomable physical and emotional suffering to innocents. His was the face I saw when I would brood about my sixth-grade Holocaust studies, until I had to envision him and his henchmen in Hell. (Some of us Catholic kids took our upbringing seriously.)

Maybe it's partly because I know Hitler got his comeuppance and is long gone as a threat that I find him trumped in face-of-evil supremacy by a megalomaniacal cave-dweller who, fortunately, was seriously impeded (but not stopped) after one day. Oh, but that day....

Everything we never saw plays out in my head every anniversary more insistently than what we all did see, like a horrible sad movie that I don't want playing but can't shut off. Unplug it, go ahead, I've already tried - it has its own power inside.

The film opens with the night before a big trip: eleventh-hour inventory of stopping the mail and shutting off the water woven through the last-second soft mumbling and giggling of a couple deciding everything is go before turning in late.

Cut to next morning and a flight boarding line, bobbing Disney hats happily chattering away with Mom and Dad, the usual quiet passengers, a few nervous fliers, a couple of big leather briefcases, the greeting from the flight attendants while overhead compartments snap and thud. Everybody buckles up for takeoff.