That day is still as clear in my mind as today. I belive that it will stay that way forever. The feeling of helplessness is overwelming. Nothing could have been done to stop it. Such evil deeds done in the name of some god.
What causes this sort of thing to happen? But there are more serious questions we need to ask. How do we keep it from happening again? Is giving up freedom worth the cost of safty?
First off, security must be better. But that's not realy all that much of an issue. Those planes where taken over with box cutters, or similar items. If a person felt the need he could use a sharp piece of plastic, or a shard of glass. Metal detectors simply won't work.
There is no good way to totaly prevent this sort of thing unless you give up all freedom. And even then it's not going to be 100% effective.
As I see it full strip searches would be required for every passanger, and no carry on luggage. Basicly a bunch of people on a plane in togas. You wouldn't give them back thier clothing, or any personal items. Those would be stored in a seperate place unavaliable till landing.
That's the only way to lower the chance to a very low level.
Is it worth the cost though?
Depends on who you ask. Anyone who lost someone would agree, even if just a passing friend. Others would complain that your being far too strick, and become a problem in themselves.
It all depends on what they have been through.
Personaly I don't belive it's worth the cost. Then again if I noticed someone causing a problem of that sort, I'd be one of the first to break his legs (and any other body part that is handy). If everyone would just deal with it as such this wouldn't be an issue. Remember flight 93?
Something else has happend. Things aren't the same anymore. It's difficult to put into words. That seems to be passing a bit though. People forgit far to easy.
I know that this is going to happen again, it does every time. In a couple of years most people will have forgotten the lessons they learned. Putting the unpleasent memorys into the back of thier mind never to be seen again.
This is exactly what you must not do!
If we forgit what has happend the past mistakes will occur again. This is a fact.
I woke up early that morning, my car needed a minor repair. Ironicly I wasn't able to get home the night before, otherwise I wouldn't have been up yet.
After takeing care of that, I headed to the office. Nothing intersting, just to wait for the repair to be done. Justin was having problems pulling up cnn.com for some reason. I tried on my my powerbook, but to no avail. Tried a couple other news sites and got the same result.
I then tried slashdot.org to see if we had just suddenly dropped off the internet. It came up fine, though a bit slow.
reading through the articles I saw one about a plane crashing into some building in NYC. I passed it by thinking little of it, then went back up. All the links where to news sites around the world. All slashdoted (a sort of denial of service due to so many people trying to access a single document). So I went through the comments. I don't know how many posts there where, but at least 1000+. I thought it was some sort of joke, I just couldn't belive that something like that could actualy happen.
Amazingly I was able to get through to cnn. I was astounded, the pictures looked like something out of an action movie. I was still having a hard time accepting that it had actualy happend.
One of the owners walked in, came into our little section and let us know that the pentagon had been hit as well.
We spent the rest of the day with an AM radio (since the internet was so congested) listening to rehashes of what had transpired. They kept finding out little bits of new info, but not anything very usefull.
That day was very slow. The only people who called up where either too moronic to care, or hadn't heard yet. Not a single person yelled that day, nobody made any complaints.
I still can't belive it happend, it was just like a dream. The night before I had a hard time getting to sleep. Ususaly there are reasons for this sort of thing.
Never again, EOF