Stupid White Men

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Originally posted by Tobiasly
The rest of you, huh? Are you saying nothing changed for you on 9/11? You don't think maybe our security was a little lacking?

Maybe you disagree about how it's being fixed, but surely you don't think everything should have just continued as normal?

I'm saying that for me -- personally -- nothing changed on 9/11.

On 9/10, did I feel that:
(a) there was significant anti-US sentiment around the world,
(b) some of the reasons for that sentiment had justification (from the perspective of those holding those opinions),
(c) our security (at airports, at our borders, at major public places) was visibly lacking,
(d) someone creative could easily catch America sleeping and do something really nasty, and that
(e) America would react very badly to the discovery that it was not in fact forever invulnerable and impregnable?

Yes, I did. And I did not cheer or celebrate when I turned on the radio and found that I was correct on all five counts. The state of the world is nothing new; all that is different is that on 9/11, America took a major hit within its own borders, and (to borrow from the late Douglas Adams) America reeled like it had been mugged in a meadow. I view 9/11 as a symptom of the problems, not as the problem itself.

Are there many things that can be, should have been and still should be fixed? Of course. But I view most of the Bush administration's corrective measures to be useless at best, and dramatically counterproductive at worst.

Unlike many, I don't view Muslims in general with any more suspicion than I did on 9/10 (that is to say, none). I don't view any countries in the Middle East as "the enemy," because I view the average citizens in those countries as having about as much control over the acts of their leaders as average Americans have over theirs (that is to say, none). I don't fly... but I didn't fly before 9/11, either, and not for terror-related reasons (more because I'm a chickenshit who's admittedly superstitious about plane crashes, regardless of the actual ratio of crashes to safe flights).

From a direct, personal standpoint, the ONLY difference in my everyday life is that I get frisked by an electronic wand before I go into the Spectrum to watch Phantoms games. (And if I was a terrorist, a minor-league hockey game would be MY first choice of target.)

Of course, I'm a suburban white boy who makes a comfortable living -- not someone of vaguely Arabic appearance, or someone with a French background or surname, or someone who's received death threats for publically opposing the Iraq war, or someone penned into a "First Amendment Zone" a mile away from the person they're protesting, or someone sitting in a cell at Gitmo without recourse or representation, or someone related to anyone who was in the WTC or the Pentagon or any of the four flights that crashed.

For them, things have changed... which is a shame.