Barely anyone on the planet can have missed the terrible atrocities last week in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh. The whole heart-breaking affair has inspired more amateur journalism and weblogging than any other news story in memory; of course this is where I only add to the white noise. In the vaguest way, I'm acquainted with people who have been affected by the disaster - friends who live in New York, friends of friends or relatives who died or narrowly escaped death - but I cannot possibly claim to know the full extent of their grief, or to be qualified to pontificate on how they should respond to the tragedy. All I can do is talk about how I'm feeling as events continue to unfold.
I don't think anyone with a heart could have seen those images from the World Trade Centre without a sense of horror, without even shedding a tear. The sad sight of someone hundreds of storeys in the air, waving a white flag as if in surrender, desperately hoping to be rescued. The footage of a couple jumping from the greatest height hand in hand: one can only begin to imagine the hellish circumstances which would have forced them to make such an insane decision. Then, as New York began to put itself back together, the parade of firemen and emergency services, with citizens lined along the street shouting: "You are our heroes, we need our heroes": beautiful yet horrendous all at once.
Arriving at work one morning or leaving from an airport, these people surely didn't imagine they were anything other than safe. It surely wouldn't have crossed their minds that they had any stake in world politics. They weren't soldiers at war, they were like you and me: feeling cosseted and confident in their world.
What will come of all this? Other than a continued mourning and feeling of loss, I think we've all gained a sense of perspective. Our line between fantasy and reality, between our Western world and the planet as a whole, has been shifted right about. We've laughed along with popcorn movies like Independence Day and Godzilla, delighting in seeing American cities torn apart on celluloid. It's going to be hard ever again to perceive an exploding building as entertainment. These pyrotechnics, so common in Hollywood, seem utterly disgusting now we've been reminded of the human toll they represent.
I think many people, particularly American citizens, have realised that - even if we aren't consciously aware of it - we Westerners are attached to the wider world. We're not superior to it, blithely looking down on those poor refugees and third world nations. We're right there among them: our actions, our Governments' actions, have an effect on other people. Few of us can imagine ever believing in anything enough to carry out acts so stupendously horrific and destructive, but these terrorists did. So I can't agree with those commentators who call the NYC terrorists cowards, because their plan - insane and twisted though it was - clearly required a suicidal sort of courage for its success...and that's what made them so hard to stop. So unlike the Gulf War, presented to us as something like a video game, the threat of terrorism has informed America that it's not invincible.
In fact, though no single terrorist act in the UK has been quite as awful in terms of casualties as the WTC attack, we have nevertheless grown up with the threat of terrorism. Cities throughout England and particularly Northern Ireland have been bombed, with many innocent civilians needlessly killed. The UK Government has repeatedly adjusted laws to reduce our personal freedoms in an attempt to more easily prosecute terrorists. I've been stopped and questioned by police time and again under this pretext - it's just something one gets used to, just like one gets used to trains being cancelled or streets being closed due to bomb scares.
Of course, it never gets easier to hear of people being killed, but sadly there are citizens of countries throughout the world who live under a constant fear far more than ours. Of course America did not deserve to be attacked but nevertheless, as America's brutal and saddening wounds begin to heal, one hopes that she will have ever more compassion and empathy for the predicaments of similarly-suffering nations. For example: I hope we will pay attention to Iraqi innocents, suffering from our continued embargoes and still being bombed by Allied planes as recently as a few months ago. I hope Americans will have as much sympathy for Palestinian innocents as many have for Israel. I hope that those few Americans known to fund the IRA will cease their actions. I hope that we will remember that most of the Afghani people have already been downtrodden by the Taliban and deserve our help, not our hatred. Maybe more of us in the UK and US will realise what a terrible business it is to sell arms, especially when used in the past for utterly unjust purposes in places like Indonesia.
