NOW PLAYING: Nine-One-One
13 September, 2001
Nine-One-One. September 11, 2001. The day everything changed for everyone everywhere. I happened to be helping my parents load up a truck for their move back north, and when The Wife called me to say an airliner had just slammed into the World Trade Center I thought "What a horrible accident." It didn't occur to me that it was a deliberate act.
Then, of course, when I got back into my folks' house and turned on the television, I saw the second jet fly into the second tower and knew that had been done on purpose. My parents and I watched a while in horror and shock, then turned on a radio outside while we continued to work, catching reports on the TV as we walked past with another armload of stuff for the truck.
I was surprised again when the towers collapsed and knew that the death toll would be catastrophic — greater than the Pearl Harbor attack that it was being compared to; a second "Day of Infamy." The talking heads would refer to the terrorists as "cowardly," but that seems like the wrong word. "Evil," would be appropriate. "Despicable," "Horrible," or "Cold-blooded," yes. But purposely commandeering an airliner full of fuel to crash it into a building, knowing that would mean certain death — I can't call that "cowardice." Now, the fiends who ordered and planned this attack — I can call them cowardly, as they hide in their mud huts someplace in an attempt to avoid retribution...
And just why were these bastards able to hijack four airliners at once? Why were three or four punks with boxcutters capable of holding off sixty or so people in each plane? Well, a couple of reasons that I can see:
- Until now, hijackers have never been suicidal. It's always been "Take us to Cuba!" or "Let our 25 comrades from the Peoples Liberation Front of Elbonia out of prison!" and the hostages were released (or the cops stormed the planes and blew the hijackers' brains out). Previously, there wasn't really any reason to resist. That's going to change now — if your plane is hijacked and you're headed for a fiery death anyway you might as well fight back. Maybe you'll win (and live).
- By herding everyone through the airport "security" system, everyone (except the hijackers, of course) was disarmed and defenseless. Even the pilots. We'll trust a pilot with flying a plane full of people but won't let him carry a handgun? Where's the sense in that? A lot of pilots are ex-military men. Think of what could have happened to those sunsabitches with knives if there had been just one lawful person onboard each aircraft who was trained and armed with a pistol.
Instead of that, there will be an increase in "security" measures, which means that future air travel is going to be even more of a truly royal pain-in-the-ass than it currently is, and a terrorist with an inside connection in an airport will still be able to smuggle weapons onboard, and everyone else will continue to be defenseless. There are already plenty of non-thinking people in this country who are pleading with the bureaucrats to make us all "safer" by increasing the power and control of the government; people scrambling to give up more of the few shreds of freedom that we still have in the vain hope that it will "protect" us from further terrorist attacks, which of course, it won't.
If this happens, it will be a huge victory for the terrorists. President Bush said that this was an attack on "our very freedom" and if these evil men can restrict any of the liberties we currently enjoy, if they can, by their actions, continue or hasten the collapse of our Bill of Rights, they will have won. As Ben Franklin once said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
What we (and especially the government) need to remember is that the enemy is those who would perpetrate terror in the world and not the American people. My gut feeling is that these terrorists need to be hunted down and eliminated, or the next time — and there will be a next time if we sit back and do nothing as we have in the past — it may not be airliners full of fuel, but nukes or biological weapons. The death toll will not be thousands, but millions. As horrible as this attack is, it'll look like just a bad car wreck next to what could happen the next time.
This is too terrible to simply be called a "crime," but deliberately killing massive amounts of civilians isn't properly called "war," either. I suppose it could be labeled a "war crime." In any case, this isn't something to be dealt with in a court of law, it's something to be handled with bullets, blood and death for those who had a part in this atrocity. It won't be quick, it won't be easy and it won't be pretty. It'll mean more American casulties. I'm not sure if we, as a nation, have the will and the resolve to fight the battle that would have to be fought to try and defeat terrorists around the globe. Unfortunately, I think that our government's actions across the world have contributed mightily to the motives of these terrorists and that the "success" of this horrific attack will likely gain them more money and followers for future attacks.
What happens next?
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