When I talked to my brother Jim the day of the attacks, he said that he wanted to fly over the Middle East and see nothing but piles of smoking rubble. He wanted vengeance.

A little later, I saw President Bush say that the people who did this will pay.

That's what I wanted to hear.

But as the days stretch into weeks, as the rage gets processed through diplomatic, military, and administrative bureaucracies, it gets attenuated. That is what these bureaucracies are for.

Think about capital punishment. The people who advocate it often argue that it's a deterrent or even, God help us, that it's cheaper to put people to death than to imprison them for life.

Well, to be blunt, horseshit. Many people wanted Timothy McVeigh dead. Someone sentenced Timothy McVeigh to death. Someone put Timothy McVeigh to death. People watched Timothy McVeigh being put to death on closed-circuit television.

These people talked justice, law, "order." What they meant was revenge.

Jim and I know something about this; our brother Bob was murdered in 1983. The guy who killed him drove into a tree a few minutes later and died. I was glad. I wanted him dead. I am as serious as I can be when I say I would gladly have killed him myself.

That feeling is almost universal. It is human, it is Biblical, and it underlies our sense of justice. It is the other side of love, or is perhaps actually entailed by love; you can't care about someone deeply and not be outraged by people who cause them pain. We need the guts to claim our rage.

Of course, real revenge has to be directed at the people who actually did this; it can't be a matter of leaving the Middle East pile of smoking rubble. We should do as little harm to the innocent as we can. But the people who did this - the ones who are not already dead - should die.

Even as we process our revenge into concerted, systematic action, let's hold on to our rage. That's one of the things that makes us human. The dead of 9.11 should be mourned, but they should be - they must be - avenged.