Looking back
Sep. 11th, 2006 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrphFive years already? I guess so. I was sitting at work when the news came in.
Alan, who sat opposite me, had the BBC News tickertape running - his first comment was something like "some idiot's managed to fly a plane into a skyscraper". Then the details started to arrive. BBC live news was on one of the big screens in one of our meeting rooms. People drifted in and out, watching snippets, looking a little dazed.
People said that there might be 50,000 dead; that there were more dead than Hiroshima; that this must be Iraq. There were other planes, but nobody knew how many. Lots of rumours and misinformation.
Despite all the news footage, it took a little while to understand that this was real.
[I was already on LJ at the time. There are a few posts from 11/09/01 and the days that followed in the archives. It's strange for me to look back at that sort of thing, to see just how events have shifted]
Alan, who sat opposite me, had the BBC News tickertape running - his first comment was something like "some idiot's managed to fly a plane into a skyscraper". Then the details started to arrive. BBC live news was on one of the big screens in one of our meeting rooms. People drifted in and out, watching snippets, looking a little dazed.
People said that there might be 50,000 dead; that there were more dead than Hiroshima; that this must be Iraq. There were other planes, but nobody knew how many. Lots of rumours and misinformation.
Despite all the news footage, it took a little while to understand that this was real.
[I was already on LJ at the time. There are a few posts from 11/09/01 and the days that followed in the archives. It's strange for me to look back at that sort of thing, to see just how events have shifted]
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 02:33 pm (UTC)Not that any of that would matter either - after all, in a hostage situation people were educated to stay calm, don't struggle, the hijackers will make demands and eventually the passengers will be freed in exchange for those demands.
So I disagree. The only thing I can think of that could have been done would have been to actively enforce immigration laws in the US (that would have nailed half the hijackers) and to possibly pursuing a foreign policy that replaced failed nations with functional ones. Perhaps educating people in self defense and crisis management might have helped - but the risk is that the circumstances might have been escalated to compensate for that.
The first the US still doesn't have the will to do. The second requires a lot of commitment, forethought, and planning, which is not the forte of lawyers turned politicians and armchair viewers.
And the third... depends on an educated, self-supporting, and focused population. Something that doesn't exist in most western nations.