I was sitting at a desk in my workplace when I heard the news. Lisa came over and whispered, "I know you can appreciate the magnitude of this. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center." I didn't know how to take it. The first thing I did was surf to CNN to see what was going on. Busy. I surfed to MSNBC. Busy, but it loaded. The only thing it loaded was a short blurb about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, with an ominous graphic - the skyline of New York, with an ominous plume of smoke billowing out of one of its tallest features. I quickly discarded this as fairly unimportant. I knew there were people dead, and I knew that it was most definitely a disaster. But I assumed outright that it was an accident, an event to which no responsibility could be attached. An hour later, when the second building collapsed, it was clear that this was not only a far-greater event than I had originally thought, but it was the most significant national event that had ever occurred in my lifetime.
At schools and workplaces everywhere, even outside this country, there were people just like me. Slowly but surely taking in the magnitude of the disaster, and coming to terms with it. And we are all still coming to terms with it. Hundreds, probably thousands of lives have been lost. Billions of dollars worth of raw capital has been destroyed. Billions more dollars worth of commerce has been lost as the country basically shut itself down for the bulk of the week after the disaster. All of this, and there is most definitely more to come. That is perhaps the most sobering thought of all - that we may not have seen the worst of it yet.
The markets are schedule to open on Monday. Just as they were schedule to open today, and just as they were scheduled to open yesterday. And when they open, we shall see the attitude of the investors who have been gritting their teeth since the shit went down. So many dollars have been lost by so many corporations that the effect will definitely be felt by the markets. Entire companies will go under. This, coupled with an already slowing economy, could bring about the worst economic conditions this country has seen since the last recession, possibly the Great Depression.
At the same time, the political atmosphere is charged. The people of the country are drawing close, and the politicians are also uniting. But to what end? We have not sustained an attack from an outside, sovereign country. We have been attacked by our own commercial planes. There is no enemy to bomb, and there is no government to threaten. Everything we do will be indirect, imprecise, and arrogant, and therefore, could raise the ire of many world leaders. Ironically, this is exactly the attitude that presumably made us a target of these attacks in the first place.
It is this angle of the issue that troubles me the most. I, like so many of my patriotic brothers and sisters, support my country. I stand by my country, and I will do what is asked of me, and more. But aside from mourning the dead, and helping to clean up the mess that has been made, what can we as individuals do? In 1941, thousands of young men enlisted in the Armed Forces to go and fight Japan, a nation that had surreptitiously bombed American soil. But who do we enlist ourselves to go and fight? Afghanistan? Iraq? Or do we simply conquer all the peoples of the Earth to insure this does not happen again?
There is no enemy. We might pin all of this on one particular individual, and we might even have the satisfaction of putting that individual to death. But defeating an individual and a nation are two different things. Those directly responsibly are already dead. The closure of World War II will not be attained - because it is far easier for another individual to orchestrate a destructive terrorist attack against our country than it is for another nation to defeat us on the battlefield. And every militant group across the world knows it, if they didn't already. And that is a significantly frightening prospect.
