Say it isn't so!

I just received an e-mail from a business acquaintance titled, "Here she is!!!"

The she in question? The brand spanking-new USS New York, the battleship built from scrap metal from the destroyed World Trade Center.

I have a knot in the pit of my stomach. What the hell is wrong with us??? Is this how we show the world we're not afraid of terrorists — build another battleship with which to conquer? Our precious people and buildings were destroyed, so from their scraps we've built another tool with which to destroy others?? Is it just me, or is there something seriously flawed about this kind of thinking?

As I looked at the pictures, my first thoughts (hopes?) were that it was one of those hoax e-mails that goes around, like the ones about the 21-foot-long crocodile swimming around the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Turns out, though, that it's true, as per both Snopes and About.com's Urban Legends.

Here's the text from the e-mail:

USS New York

It was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center.

It is the fifth in a new class of warship - designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, LA to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept 9, 2003, "those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence," recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. "It was a spiritual moment for everybody there."

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the "hair on my neck stood up. It had a big meaning to it for all of us," he said. "They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back."

The ship's motto? "Never Forget"

Please keep this going so everyone can see what we are made of in this country!

What we're made of??!!

This is not a victory — it's an embarrassment.

I don't get it. How can we ever hope to claim the moral high ground if this is what we do in the aftermath of such heinous events as occurred on 9/11/2001? Yes, we're human — and as such, we are a warring people. Violence is pretty much a foregone conclusion at some time and place on the globe. Its nature need not be indiscriminate, though. And it should always be the last solution, not the first.

As Chris Meredith states in his article about the only evolutionary stable strategy when it comes to game theory, tit for tat:

Long before humans started playing games, natural selection discovered the fundamentals of game theory and shaped animal societies according to its rules. Within species, individuals adopt alternative competing strategies with frequencies that reflect the success of each strategy. Evolutionary Stable Strategies occur when alternative competing strategies are at equilibrium. ... However, co-operation within and between species has generated only one Evolutionary Stable Strategy, TIT FOR TAT.

The importance of TIT FOR TAT to the evolution of co-operative behaviour was discovered in a very unusual way, through a worldwide computer competition to find the winning strategy for the well known paradox 'The Prisoner's Dilemma'. In 1981 TIT FOR TAT won that competition, and ever since then it has grown in stature to where it now dominates our thinking about the evolution of co-operative behaviour in animal and human societies.

The United States seems intent on skipping this lesson.

I've never been a pessimist, always finding the bright side of an issue or circumstance. But I am also a realist. We cannot celebrate this repurposing of the buildings that housed our center of commerce as war tools and expect to win anything. You've likely heard the old analogy: It's like taking a hammer to the fire alarm instead of putting out the fire. Or this one: When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Albert Einstein had it right when he said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Are you willing to at least consider thinking differently about this new battleship called the USS New York? And then will you tell someone?