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...someone, somewhere has to know / silver rain was falling down / upon the dirty ground of London town.... "London Town," Wings I felt compelled to write a long-awaited (?) bit in the Brits section of my site, after the horror of the 07.07.05 terrorist attacks on the London Underground and a double-decker bus. Thankfully, my best British mate wrote me an email to tell me that our London friends were okay. If the Beltway sniper and the 9-11 attacks have taught us anything, you can't predict what's coming next, and unfortunately for London Town, death and injury followed the exuberance the city had after being awarded the 2012 Olympics. I was at the hospital yesterday getting some radiology tests done and I thought it was really quite bad taste of a nurse's joke I heard in passing was just too much. The "joke" that the Parisians must have bombed London, because they were sore losers about not getting the Olympics and having London win it instead. For those of you who don't know, French prime minister Jacques Chirac made a major social and, turns out, costly gaffe this past weekend before the International Olympic Committee [IOC} was to deliberate on the location of the 2012 Olympics. He apparently confided in Russian president Vladimir Putin that the only culinary contribution Britain ever made to the world was mad cow disease, and that Finnish food was just plain bad. The word got out on Chirac's backroom banter, and the Finnish voting representative was probably none too happy to hear of it. While the votes are kept secret, it is very possible that the Finnish rep's vote for any city besides Paris could have done the frogs in. Chirac is probably kicking himself now, if his countrymen aren't doing it already. Anyway, I thought that would provide a little comic relief. Seriously though, having lived in the United States all my life, I've never witnessed a full-scale attack on my homeland's soil. (Unless you count the Beltway sniper and his accomplice, but thankfully, both of them were caught.) Rationing has never been part of my vocabulary. I've never seen tanks lined up ready to attack, and I've never learned what to do in case of an air raid, because I was born too late. But there are plenty of Brits who remember the dark days of WWII and how Churchill had his talks on the radio (similar to FDR's "fireside chats"), rallying his people to not give an inch to the enemy. Some people don't take into account that London (and the entire country) lived through the air raids of world wars and had lights-out for many nights because that was "required" of them during such rough times. I always thought because England was its own island, that made it nearly invulnerable to most attacks. Except for the horrific atomic bombings of Japan, most islands are pretty difficult to get to, and therefore, usually last on attackers' lists because it's just too darn difficult to attack an island. Regardless, if these London attacks are any indication, with technology being the way it is, you CAN attack places like London. It makes you wonder if anywhere you go is safe anymore. Of course, the fallout from this terrorist attack, besides bringing more attention to the Gleneagle, Scotland G-8 summit, also brings out those idiotic journalists who go to Dulles International Airport (one of the three D.C. area airports) and ask people headed on planes to vacation in England if they're "scared" and thinking about canceling their trips. The truth of the matter is, everywhere on this planet has some level of risk. One man interviewed said, "I'm more likely to get into an auto accident on the I-95 than to get injured in England." (I-95 is the big highway that goes north to south down most of the east coast of the United States, and has accidents, it seems, everyday.) Good comment sir. My feeling is that the Brits will unfailingly take this attack in stride and go on their daily lives, because their resiliency through history has been unmatched. It'll be the visitors who will be biting their nails. continued...

2005 - mlmchang