today has been a pretty
today has been a pretty scary and unbelievable day. when I sat down to work at 8:45 (which was almost noon on the east coast), i started reading my email. I started hitting a series of messages with titles like ‘world trade center….1/2 gone‘. now, at 8:45, my brain was barely able to comprehend this. I tried to find a reliable news feed on the internet, but most sites were swamped, and ended up turning on the television.
the scope of this act of terrorism is almost too much to deal with. oklahoma city was organized, but really it was half a dozen militia members who managed to go out and rent a ryder truck. here we’re talking about simulatenously hijacking 4 jumbo jets and piloting them. in addition to the groups that actually hijacked the planes, there had to be dozens of support people and enormous amounts of money to pull this off..and who’s to say that it’s not going to happen again tomorrow, next month, next year? emily said earlier today, “I don’t understand what the terrorists think that they’re going to gain. They killed an enormous number of innocent civilians, and as a result, we’re going to bomb the shit out of them.” while neither of us agree that this is necessarily a good thing, it seems pretty likely that the US is going to retaliate, and it’s not going to be good news for the group or country responsible.
as scary as the though of continued terrorism against the united states is, the repercussions of these events are going to be even worse. i think that we’ll see a restriction of personal freedoms in the united states..in airports, travel, beefing up survelliance on the internet, things like that. i’m also worried about the reaction toward arabs in the united states. even if this attack wasn’t planned by osama bin-ladin, i think that US anti-arab sentiment will grow. if the yahoo message boards i browsed through this afternoon, with their racial epithets and calls for retaliation/isolationism are any indication of public sentiment, it’s going to be a rough couple of months. i hope that everyone i know in new york city is safe and healthy.
here are a couple of interesting discussions/articles about these events:
cnn had good coverage throughout the day
a discussion of today’s events on metafilter
the discussion of the events on slashdot
the frontline report on osama bin-ladin
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