rainwolfkin

first disbelief - hearing reports over the radio

.......... and then thoughts of you

I'm glad you're ok

however small that is

This is exactly the kind of cool thing I like to hear -- hold on, I'm not talking about the bombings themselves -- I'm talking about the description you gave of how people dealt with it; helping each other out, not pushing and shoving or climbing over each other to reach "safety." It's not the same when something like this happens in the US; people here become untrusting, they stop helping and start fearing each other. If a bomb went off in a NY subway, you'd be lucky not to be killed by the other passengers, forget the bomb.

And of course, it's not everyone -- many people do everything they can to help, but my point is it's refreshing to hear that sometimes people actually do react to events of tragedy in a way which doesn't simply spread the damage.

You know, when terrorists bomb the US, they get exactly what they wanted out of it, it would seem. We panic and start randomly killing people all over the place, blowing up anything that looks threatening. We start to distrust our own citizens and create unconstitutional alterations to our laws to allow the government to more efficiently persecute the innocent. I mean, we basically do exactly what they did to us, but we don't even know who to focus it on. I heard some totally mad conservative talkshow on the radio the other day, where some complete redneck asshole called up to say, "ah think it's 'bout time ta take this here war ta some o' them other fuckers in the middle east." The host agreed with great emotion. Yeah, okay.. and what exactly did these random nations do to us?

The most damaging thing you can do to those who want to cause chaos and destruction is to not buy into the fear trip. It's called terrorism for a reason, right? If the attacks bring people together as a society to help each other, then the desired effect of the attack is neutralized entirely; they didn't really care about stopping the London transportation system, they wanted to make people in Europe freak out and start making poor the decisions like the US is.

I actually didn't want to make that into a big rant about US foreign policy, sorry.