09.13.2001 || 17h33 p.m.

cf's last post about NYC

Um, I think it might be time to sit back and think a bit more clearly about the world and each person's place in it. Maybe it's time for the US to pull back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may, maybe it's time for Canada and the UK to stop marching in lockstep with Washington. On the other hand, maybe it's time for the US to show a heavy hand in the Middle East, and for Ottawa to fling our troops into the world as warriors instead of peacekeepers for once. I don't know which is right, but I hope that no one gets nailed until we know exactly who to blame. It would be too easy to launch a viscious cycle of strikes and counter strikes, and the difference is that whereas the terrorists will be hard to hit with any sort of decisive blow, the US and its allies make for one big, fat target.

I know it's time for a harder Canadian hand in terms of the existence of anti-US terror cells operating from our soil . I also know that NATO has essentially declared war, but that we don't know who we're fighting, and that's the reason why this is *nothing* like Pearl Harbour, no matter what the media says.

But a whole swack of you down in NYC are saying that you don't feel safe there anymore and you want to leave. A lot of people are still shaken, still a bit panicked maybe, but I think you've now got less to worry about than you did a week ago. You've already been hit, and the city has not degenerated into rioting mobs and feudal rulers. Be proud of it. The situation might have fallen to precisely that elsewhere.

The one genius of filling your country up with symbols and icons for the world to admire and loathe is that terrorists will likely aim for those instead of aimless explosions on sidestreets and shopping malls. The WTC was an office complex full of innocents, but it was also famous the world over. The Pentagon, well we all know what *that* is. It's still horrible, but it's not random.

In 1970, when any mailbox or garbage bin on any Montr�al street could explode at any moment, nobody knew whether they were leaving their house for the last time. This was because there were no overpowering symbols of Canada anywhere, ergo nothing huge and symbolic to take down. This is the same kind of random campaign that citizens of London and Belfast have lived with for years. These cities have not been left as abandoned ghost towns, but rather people live with the risk.

You live surrounded by symbols and icons of America's might. These make much more mediagenic targets for crazed killers than do stores and restaurants, and whereas I have always thought that working at a recognised US icon isn't safe, I also think that after this hell is over, the majority of you will be as safe in the Bronx or Brooklyn or even much of Manhattan as you have always been. Life will go on because at the end of it all, love you or hate you, no one can deny that you are strong and bloody-minded enough to pick up and keep going, no matter what gets thrown into your plate.

We are also entering a new world where plane hijacking will probably be less likely to occur. I reckon that a more hard-line approach to skyjacking will make it a less attractive avenue for angry sects and individuals from now on. I also think that it's unlikely that New York will be hit again very soon, and I hope to both Gods that I am not wrong.

Don't run away from your city, friends, not because of last Tuesday. Don't let those bastards win, even over just one of you. New York needs you to go on living life as it should be lived: as free citizens, not frightened victims.



||Gods save the Queen,
||cf

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older shite

One last little note... - 09.21.2006

de-stressing, biking and terrorism - 06.06.2006

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