Category: terrorism

In case you forgot… Digital Journalist has a special issue: Seeing the Horror. Some amazing images, but not for the faint of heart.

Good morning, sunshine. How does it feel to wake up and realize (finally) that your entire world has changed and will never be the same? It’s taken almost a month, but it’s finally sunk in. The stock options I had such faith in 18 months ago are worth about a third what they were then, and there’s very little light at the end of the rainbow. Still, I’m better off than the folks who bet the farm on a startup that’s now just a memory.

The old reliable stuff like TV, football, movies and entertainment in general doesn’t have the draw it once did. CNN’s the order of the day, and the news isn’t good.

They say that we’re in a national state of shock/mourning. They’re right. I’m shocked. I’m mourning our national lost innocence. We’re so short-sighted, and have even shorter memories. I think I now know what the country felt like on in December of 1963, a month after President Kennedy was assassinated. Lost, wandering, watching the news and not believing it.

I can’t believe that anthrax is a real threat, and that the Postal Service won’t spend the money to test its employees. That just doesn’t seem right. I can’t believe that we can bomb a country with almost pinpoint accuracy, yet we can’t get airport security right.

Maybe I’m on the road to recovery, and I’m grappling with denial. I hope things turn out. I hope “they” figure out everything, and get it under control. But mostly, I look at my little boy and pray that he’ll be ok, and that that blue envelope with the powder in it wasn’t what it could be. I pray that those two sheriff’s deputies who came and got it really tested it instead of just throwing it away, and that the test comes back saying it was just correcting fluid, or sand, or something other than what it could be.

Oh, and I forgot one for Dave’s list: When Good Muslims Go Bad – still on the “Bad Fox Special” theme.

And here’s the worst one I can think of, to the tune of that old camp song: “Hello Mullah. Hello Osama. You ‘ttacked us, so we bombed ya! Hope we catch ya. Hope we kill ya. That’s what you get for bein’ evil.” It works with the rhythm… got some rhyming problems. But, that’s ok. I’m still proud of it.

I find myself shaking my head a lot these days. I shake it when I hear of more anthrax cases popping up, when some idiot on the local news talks about things he knows nothing about, when people think that when the war in Afghanistan ends that the terrorism will stop. I’m just here shaking my head wondering how it came to this and not finding any answers.

Osama is Evil – if you need any more proof, just look who he’s hanging out with (look at poster, over his right shoulder).

Other Links (via caterina)

• Yahoo Pic
• Yahoo Pic 2
• MetaFilter Discussion
• Wired Story
• An excellent history of Bert and Osama

And the source!! The maker of the poster must have used this picture (via Owais from a Bert is Evil site). It makes me laugh that at this “Down with America” rally, people are holding up posters with a picture of an American character on them. Too funny. Is that ironic, Alanis?

“Is al Qaeda sending coded messages to followers via video statements?”

That’s the question of the day at CNN.com. You’d have to be an idiot to think the messages are in code. They’re right out there in the open. They’re asking anyone who believes in their cause to go out and find a Yankee to kill. I don’t see “code” in there anywhere.

So, we’re bombing Afgahnistan. They say this will last for the foreseeable future. You know, on the 11th, I realized that my world had changed. I’m still not ready for my world to turn around. It’s selfish, but that’s the truth.

During the past couple weeks, during the pain, grief, hope and heroism, I’ve been recalling something that happened to me during high school.

Desert Storm started when I was a Sophomore. I remember sitting in Madame Nelson’s French class discussing how cool it was going to be. We were going to bomb the living hell out of them. It was a movie, and we were going to watch it all on CNN. I remember bringing up statistics and cool military terms I’d heard my dad use. I felt really smart since my dad helped draw up a lot of the plans for fighting in the Middle East and was in the Pentagon’s Command Center for much of the war. He wasn’t going over there. For me, Desert Storm was very much a remote-control war. I watched it all on TV, heard about it from my dad, and never saw the death and destruction. It was all very antiseptic/Saturday afternoon TV for me.

Back to French Class. While my friend and I were discussing bombs, fighter planes and the advantages of the Abrams M1-A1 tank, there was a girl sitting next to me with a black armband on her right arm. I noticed it and asked her about it. She said she was wearing it because she didn’t like the war. She didn’t like that people were fighting over there and that we were there over oil and killing so we didn’t have to pay more for gas. That set my friend and I off. We spent the rest of class making fun of her for thinking something other than what ‘we’ thought.

I feel bad about that now. I don’t even remember her name, but I remember the look on her face. I remember feeling superior because I was onboard. I was ‘we’. I wish I could find her and apologize.

Don’t let the people who attacked us make us start taking away our freedoms. Free speech is paramount in the list. If we start quieting those who disagree with us, we’re no better than the people who did this. Especially now, in the wake of tragedy, we need to be mindful that we still have the right to free speech. I feel the anger well up when I read or hear something that doesn’t fall into the “patriotic American, nuke the bastards” world we live in and have been watching for the past week. I stop myself every time I feel that anger and remember the girl in French class who I made cry.

The kids in our neighborhood have shown an amazing grasp of the American/Capitalist dream since 9/11. They’ve posted patriotic drawings all over the neighborhood, on mailboxes, stop sign posts, everywhere. Now, if this were the extent of it, I’d leave out the capitalist part. But, our little entrepreneurs have also taken to the streets with hand-drawn flags in a milk box and are going door-to-door selling them. It’s nice to know that the future generation knows what to do when people are grieving – sell to them.

Not that I blame them, it gives them something to do, and makes them happy. They had a lemonade stand last week, and I think that’s cute. There are three of them, all girls and no older than 11. It’s so freaking Norman Rockwell.

That’s all from Lake Sterling, where we have no lake, the children are all selling something and the parents love their anti-depressants.