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Sep. 13th, 2001 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lsandersonThe O in Woe
The 'o" in 'woe' stands between a letter which is always falling down and a letter which is unbalanced and unstable in most of its configurations, a letter with no center, which would not roll well if attached to a wagon, or to the front of a business name. In the grief and the easy anger, in the swift bitterness, we are the nation in need of a fix. And we cast desperate eyes for whipping boys, for stockyard goats, the low-paid airport security guards, the highly paid intelligence teams with crack surveillance gear, and seek for some container to dump all the anger, the bitterness, the hate into, that, we're convinced, will bring back the twin towers and even more magically, the lives lost, and remove the horror surgically from our brains.
Most of the systems worked. This was not a huge concentrated attack. It was four teams armed with small knives and box cutters, all legal or close to legal under the then current rulings. There were no attack rifles, no hidden AK-47's planted by the cleaning crew, the airport surveillance crew did not wave them through -- no subversion of huge complexity. They did have money to go to flight school here in the good old USA, to live in the America they dreamed to destroy. (We've always been big on self-improvement.) But, our behavior pattern was wrong. (Give the nasty men what they want and few of us will get hurt.) That changed in the plane that went down close to Pittsburgh, and I suspect it will change in the air when the planes again start flying. The memory of the twin towers falling, has changed air travel far more than the soon-to-come tweaking rule-changes of government -- the millions of fixes to things that are not broken. Somebody will, and somebody can score an attack. You cannot remove all possibilities; you can only limit them slightly.
Not all the king's men could put an egg back together again, nor can any of us breathe life back into the fallen, burned, or crushed who died there, but we can very easily change a rule here, a thought there. We can launch new witch-hunts which will make Salem and McCarthy seem benign. We can begin to bully small countries in the name of revenge, spend obscene amounts of money on pompous defense systems that fills only the pockets of defense contractors, and open the flood-gates of paranoia and persecution. Or, we can seek to become better than small men, to be more than the least. When I look at the small man the Supreme Court decided would be president, I worry.
The 'o" in 'woe' stands between a letter which is always falling down and a letter which is unbalanced and unstable in most of its configurations, a letter with no center, which would not roll well if attached to a wagon, or to the front of a business name. In the grief and the easy anger, in the swift bitterness, we are the nation in need of a fix. And we cast desperate eyes for whipping boys, for stockyard goats, the low-paid airport security guards, the highly paid intelligence teams with crack surveillance gear, and seek for some container to dump all the anger, the bitterness, the hate into, that, we're convinced, will bring back the twin towers and even more magically, the lives lost, and remove the horror surgically from our brains.
Most of the systems worked. This was not a huge concentrated attack. It was four teams armed with small knives and box cutters, all legal or close to legal under the then current rulings. There were no attack rifles, no hidden AK-47's planted by the cleaning crew, the airport surveillance crew did not wave them through -- no subversion of huge complexity. They did have money to go to flight school here in the good old USA, to live in the America they dreamed to destroy. (We've always been big on self-improvement.) But, our behavior pattern was wrong. (Give the nasty men what they want and few of us will get hurt.) That changed in the plane that went down close to Pittsburgh, and I suspect it will change in the air when the planes again start flying. The memory of the twin towers falling, has changed air travel far more than the soon-to-come tweaking rule-changes of government -- the millions of fixes to things that are not broken. Somebody will, and somebody can score an attack. You cannot remove all possibilities; you can only limit them slightly.
Not all the king's men could put an egg back together again, nor can any of us breathe life back into the fallen, burned, or crushed who died there, but we can very easily change a rule here, a thought there. We can launch new witch-hunts which will make Salem and McCarthy seem benign. We can begin to bully small countries in the name of revenge, spend obscene amounts of money on pompous defense systems that fills only the pockets of defense contractors, and open the flood-gates of paranoia and persecution. Or, we can seek to become better than small men, to be more than the least. When I look at the small man the Supreme Court decided would be president, I worry.
