| Cubdriver |
09-13-2007 03:37 AM |
There's nothing unique about my own 9/11 experience; I left an 8 o'clock calculus lecture at about 9 and the attacks were playing on overhead monitors in the student building nearby that I went to next. But more striking to me personally was how profoundly some of my younger classmates were shaken by the live images they were seeing on the monitors. I think they were too young at 20 or so to grasp the significance of the disparity of values present in the various corners of the world. They did not know that poverty and bad leadership can induce fanatical beliefs so poisonous they amount to an aggregate denial of value of life itself. Such groups seek to express themselves in acts of killing, and the more innocent the victim they can kill the more their form of expression takes on meaning to them. I had never seen such an expression first hand before that day, but I knew something about the transforming power of radical beliefs and though I was deeply disturbed by the events, I wasn't very shaken. I also had an intuitive ability to understand that the attacks had been far more successful than their harebrained perpetrators had envisioned, due to the nature of steel bending under heat loads which is actually why the attacks in Manhattan were as huge as they were. I did not think at any time the attacks were the work of anything besides a group of deeply unhappy middle eastern persons focused into a larger than usual killing plan organized by an exceptionally unholy leader.
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