Blogtrek

Hypermedia Day

I was going to go to a memorial service but I didn't. All the books in my attic crashed onto the floor, so I needed to straighten that out. But I didn't go mainly because I got overdosed on Planeattack. I have been dwelling on it too much and thinking about towers falling and people running for their lives. But although this is something I could have done something about, the media did not help much. They overdosed us all today on Planeattack, devoting entire news segments to the anniversary and wiping out all other programming. I did not get much local news at all because the local news program was devoted to national ceremonies.

Although I think there should be memorial services throughout the nation today to help those still suffering from depression and grief to assuage their sorrow, the media does not need to broadcast it all. There were plenty of other news today. How about the primaries in Florida? Once again their electoral process has failed them. What about the threat of war with Iraq and the resulting rise in oil prices? That will hit your pocketbook eventually. Johnny Unitas, the American football star, died today. I did not hear a bit about any of this on the national news tonight. I heard mostly about Planeattack, an event that has already happened.

Besides, why all this focus on a tragedy that killed 3,000 people? Auto accidents kill 44,000 a year; we don't hear about them. About a decade ago, a conflict between rival tribes in Rwanda, Africa killed 200,000 people. This surely was a vaster tragedy. If Planeattack had called for wiping out all other programming for a week, surely we should have heard nothing but what happened in Rwanda for a whole year. But we only got two weeks of occasional headlines about one of the greatest tragedies of our time, and I did not hear of much people feeling sorrow for those who lost loved ones there.

Because of this media overattention on the terrorist attacks of last year, I propose we call this day Hypermedia Day. It is also Remembrance Day, but it is also the day that mediahypism went to its extreme. I think Laura Bush was right. We would have been better off today turning off the TV set.

Planeattack: One Year Later

On September 11 last year nineteen young men saw fit to hijack airplanes and fly them into three of our national landmarks, killing about 3,000 people. It was the worst event to have hit our country since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Like most people, I found some of the events unbelievable and somewhat apocalyptic. I first found out about it when I saw the headline on the CNN web page: "Breaking News: Plane crashes into World Trade Center". My first thought is that this is like the crash of a plane into the Empire State Building in 1945. But I soon found that the towers had serious wounds on them and were smoking into the sky. Shortly after this I saw the towers fall and I heard of the attack on the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. It traumatized me, just like it did most everyone else in the country; of the worst events in my life, this one ranks third. I found it hard to imagine 650 employees of the same company and same office suddenly killed, or 343 firefighters killed. Many acts of heroism occurred that day, but it was still a day of great tragedy. It leads me to wonder: why did it happen, and how can we minimize the chance that anything like this will occur again?

First of all, why did it happen? With most disasters, there are usually several causes. We may not have been watching people at the airports closely enough. Most hijackings up to now have resulted in people going somewhere else other than intended, rather than crashing into a building, so this caught people by surprise. Perhaps security was lax on the airlines. Maybe the FBI did not see the signs of it coming. Then there are the hijackers themselves. What made them do this?

First of all crashing a plane into a building and killing yourself is not something that we would normally do. These people were driven by some other force. It is my belief that this force is a fanatical belief in God coupled with an intense hatred for Israel, Jews, and anything Western. These people believed that they were truly fighting the forces of evil; they were sacrificing themselves to their cause. They were so caught up in their belief that they were willing to do anything for it. What is needed in this world is a healthy belief in self, and a desire to live life to the fullest. If these fanatics had been furthering their own future and causes instead of following the hateful beliefs of those who told them that this was a one-way ticket to heaven, Planeattack would never have happened.

But why did they have this fanatical belief? The reason for that lies in the widespread hatred of Middle Easterners for the United States and Israel. Hatred for Israel is easy to explain. Israel took over land which had been held by Arabs for centuries and is looked upon as an intruder. They are also envious of the United States and its prosperity and feel Americans get too big a slice of life's pie. We consume a lot more oil, food and other resources than they do and live a better life. They also don't like the invasion of Western culture, especially celebrityitis and media hype, into their lands. So it is not enough to heighten security, declare Delta and red alerts, arrest guilty and innocent people of Middle Eastern origin, and declare a "war" on terrorism. We need to address in addition the inequity between the rich and developing nations of this planet and this is not going to be easy. We need to work the processes of peace and develop ways of sharing the world's resources so that liberty, freedom, and just will be the province of all. To me this is the best way of ensuring that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.