"Why, Why, Why?" One week after the World Trade Center, Pentagon cum skyjacking events, I still find myself asking, like most other people: "Why, why, why? What did these terrorists hope to achieve?"
Imagine the ensuing incredible chain of events, besides the obvious sorrow of grieving families and loved ones world-wide: reduced air travel and airport closures (hence airlines survival threatened; taxi cab drivers out of job, no jobs for skycaps and baggage handlers, airport restaurants and shops closed); hotels depending on air travellers in distress; reduced tax incomes for cities, counties and states, etc. etc.
And anyway, where the heck is the suicide note - or notes - to tell us about the motives of these terrorists?
One good thing: the event will shock people into fully realizing the possibilities of man's inhumanity to man, and will enable the God Almighty to grab good victory from the jaws of bad wickedness. Already Palestine's Arafat and Israel's Sharon - their lands the breeding ground for the hopelessness and helplessness of the dispossessed-turned-terrorists - are suddenly talking peace, losing stomach for further violence.
"No Nigerians, No Single Nigerian?" It may sound morbid, but I have been muttering to myself all week: "No Nigerians? Not even a single Nigerian missing or dead?" No security attendants, no restaurant waiters, no low-level; mid- or top business executives in WTC? Are we no longer part of the world? Did our well known tardiness to work - Nigerian time, African time - save us on this one? 8:40 - 9:00 am is pretty early to get to work, is it not?
I could not believe that no Nigerians were involved in fatalities. For example, today's Washington Post reports:
QUOTE
Foreign Nationals Among the 5,422 people confirmed dead or reported missing in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or on board the hijacked planes were several hundred foreigners:
More than 100 killed or missing:
Confirmed Dead
Missing
Britain
100
100 - 200
Chile
n/a
250
Columbia
2
200
Turkey
n/a
130
Philippines
2
115
Israel
2
110
Germany
n/a
100 - 170
Between 20 and 100 killed or missing: Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ireland, Japan, Pakistan, Russia
Up to 20 killed or missing: Argentina, Belgium, Cambodia, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Taiwan, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe
Sources: Agence-France-Presse; staff reporters
UNQUOTE
Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, even Ghana, and again, no Nigeria? Are so many of us undocumented aliens or what?
Anyway, an unconfirmed listserve message is now putting Nigerians missing at 94, but agh Lord! now that is too many, if true! Another says 2 dead, 2 missing. May the actual numbers be MUCH LOWER than projected, including miraculously zero.
Amen!
My Cousin B., Nearby-Survivor My cousin B. was near Ground Zero last week Tuesday, and related his ordeal when he came to visit this past Sunday through this week Tuesday (yesterday), leaving for Britain from BWI airport yesterday morning after his three-month pharmacy internship stay at Nantuckett.
His September 11 Tuesday started early from Staten Island, leaving for Lower Manhattan on a ferry with his host F., an old school mate from Nigeria, on his way to catch an Amtrak to visit my family in Burtonsville. On the bus to Penn Station, and on getting to Fulton Street (he says within three or so blocks from WTC), they all noticed the smoldering top of WTC North Tower (hit at about 8:45 am EDT), and felt there had been a terrible accident. Amazingly, within minutes, they all saw the second plane come in and dive into South WTC Tower (at 9:03 am), and the entire bus gasped.
The bus driver hit the brakes and was the first to dive out, with his passengers following suit, all clutching their luggage. The first instinct of EVERYONE, he said, was to walk back to the ferry - and so they did, walking 10 minutes and seeing the rest of humanity thinking like them clambering back onto the ferry. Suddenly, some policeman shouted that the ferry, with so many people on board, would be a "visible target" for the terrorists - and the ferry began to empty quickly, and he and his friend headed back out of there.
They felt momentarily trapped.
Perhaps the funniest thing my cousin said - another morbid departure - was that when they all saw people jumping out of the towers, most people thought that they were the terrorists escaping after bombing the buildings! So they panicked, and ran further away from the buildings!
They must have seen that couple reported to be holding hands while jumping down from one of the WTC towers to their sure deaths, or that well-dressed business executive, tie flying and still clutching his briefcase in readiness for his next meeting with his Maker. These hapless tower escapees must have preferred to temporarily breathe fresh air on their way down rather than stay waiting for death in their smoke-filled rooms, and also preferred to have their bodies
identified below rather than be charred to smitherins inside the building. There are no other earthly reasons for what they did.
By now, my cousin B. and his friend F. had "inherited" four Black American sisters who looked to them for protection and followed them closely everywhere - with one starting to weep that if she died, her husband would be unable to take care of their three children.
[Husbands, take note.] My cousin's friend assured everybody gamely that since he did not die in Lagos, he was not about to die in New York. His indomitable spirit seemed to help.
They next all headed towards Central Park, only again to be deterred by another fear that it would too be a "visible target".
They were now trapped within a triangle of fear, but somehow, four hours later, they all managed to get out of there. That is the story of my cousin B., in a nutshell.
"Airport" Meets "Towering Inferno": Why Should Buildings Be So High? Parachutes Anybody? There is a book titled " Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail" by Matthys Levy and Professor Mario Salvadori as well as " Why Buildings and Up: The Strength of Architecture", but by Professor Salvadori alone. I am now inclined to write my own book: "Tower of Babel Remembered: Why Build So High ?"
That is precisely what Prof. Henry Petrosky, a Civil Engineering academic in Duke University who specializes in catastrophic failure of bridges and buildings, with a flair for language and who has written several books, asked in a recent Washington Post article on the disaster. Not only was he stunned that both WTC towers collapsed - and he as an engineering explanation for it - but he wonders whether in this day of telecommuting and the Internet, we need such vertical villages.
In fact, Prof. Petrosky believes that the WTC terrorist attack probably ensures not only that investors will be more wary of such high rises, but both employees and the public's appetite to visit such places will wane for the forseeable future.
I agree with him. For some religious reason, I also cannot get it out of my mind the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, constructed too high without God's permission and out of arrogance - is this another variation on the Jerry-Falwellian "judgement", with mankind trying to reach to God? Inquiring minds want to know.
Nor can I get it out of my mind the two fantastic movies "Airport" (1970; Dean Martin's last major film as leading man) and "Towering Inferno" (1974; with all-star cast Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Fred Astaire,William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner and OJ Simpson). But Tuesday September 11, was real, no need for mixing the reels from those two movies.
But I have asked myself: could that couple jumping off the 90th floor, or the business executive clutching his brief case have been saved? I think so, with better safety designs and provisions for high rises such as the following:
all windows should be low-level (for easy climbing-over if open) and fully openable (with the flip of a latch) and shatterable from the inside (with a hammer provided permanently close by; chairs will do too.)
all windows on Floors 2 - 5 (roughly a maximum of 50 feet to the ground) should be provided with at least two flame-resistant, non-metallic ropes each by which people can climb (slither) down in case of an emergency. Such ropes should be standard safety issues tied
securely and permanently to the inside floor just below the window.
employees on and visitors to Floors 6 and above should be provided with or have access to a parachute each. Certainly, you don't send a person to sea without being able to swim or having a life raft.
Would these measures, particularly the parachutes, have saved 100% of the persons in the WTC disaster? Absolutely not! 50%? Probably not. But if they will save 1%, 2% or 10% of those 5,400 declared missing now, we will probably have about 50, 100 or 500 people with us today, probably more. Even 5 people saved because of their parachutes would have been worth it.
Bearing in mind that elevators are the first items to be shut down in an emergency, and that not all people are fit enough to readily climb down 100 flights of stairs, these measures are worth considering. As for me, I will be buying a parachute before I next go beyond the third floor.
Racial Profiling Would Have Saved Lives In this Case Controversial statement, but true.
The reality is that racial profiling in this country, in the West, and I fear WORLD-WIDE - particularly of Arab-looking people - will RETURN with a vengeance. Many people, including President Bush, will speak and write AGAINST it - as I have, and will continue to - but we probably will look on with understanding when it actually happens.
That is ONE OF THE MAJOR TRAGEDIES of the circumstances of these particular sky-jackings. Imagine 19 normal-looking, Arab-looking people, many of who spent up to one year in this country, going in and out of the country, to school - flight school included - shopping in neigborhood grocery stores, swigging beer in neighborhood diners, etc. Yet, they were also busy plotting all that time, along with an unspecified number of collaborators, to WREAK so much pain on innocent people, including surely their own deaths in a suicide.
Would you then not FORGIVE anybody who, in the inner recesses of his or her heart, says "Maybe if one of them had been the "victim" of racial profiling, and then discovered, maybe we will have
been spared this tragedy?"
Take my cousin B., who finally on Sunday evening, resumed his delayed Greyhound trip from New York to Washington DC - when he could finally make it four days late. He delayed his departure further by two hours, preferring to catch the next bus BECAUSE THE VERY NEXT ONE THAT HE WOULD HAVE HOPPED ON HAD AN ARAB-LOOKING PERSON ON IT! Many people joined him and did the same thing - silently.
That kind of thinking will be with us for a long-time. Quite frankly, the Arab nations, for the sake of their own citizens in the world, have their work cut out, and should continue to denounce this particular kind of terror, and work with the rest of the world to exterminate it.
As someone pointed out, why are White Males not stereotyped after terroristic events like that of Timothy McVeigh, or those serial killers (almost exclusively Male and White) or the White Cannibal (who loved minority peoples' flesh) Jeffrey Dahmer? I respond that unfortunately, in any given political entity however so defined, it is the LARGER SOCIETY that determines THE ELEMENT OF THE STEREOTYPING - that is, that larger society that DOES NOT, by definition, INCLUDE
the group that is stereotyped.
Just as Arabs and Muslims will be further stereotyped for some time to come over this issue, Nigerians (or Africans) in the Middle East are also stereotyped one way or the other there.
Arabs - and I am afraid Muslims too - should not hem and haw about this particular terrorism. It should then be left for non-Muslims IN PARTICULAR - not necessarily exclusively - to continue to call for understanding, and call attention to the horrendous inequities and injustices in places like Palestine and Iraq which make these kinds of angst that creates terrorists inevitable. That is why we should applaud President Bush's trip to a Mosque in Washington yesterday, and Secretary of State Colin Powell's outspoken call about the Israel/Palestine conflict, asking the parties to return to the Senator George Mitchell plan for peace in the Middle East.
Brothers Falwell and Robertson Finally, the Rev. Jerry Falwell (of Liberty University) has regretted his last Thursday "700 Club" statement about the presence of "liberals, gays and civil rights advocates" being part of the reason that "helped this (WTC TRAGEDY TO) happen" because their actions had caused God to remove His protection. Pat Roberston (of Christian Broadcasting Network and host of the program "700 Club") first agreed with Falwell on air but later pleaded too that he had not fully
"understood" what Falwell said then! In his regret statement, Falwell went on to say that " "I obviously did not state my theological convictions very well, and I stated them at a bad time..[I BLAME] no one but the hijackers and terrorists for the barbaric happenings...The coming weeks would provide time for a worthy discussion about God's judgment..but it is a complicated
discussion."
So I agree with Dutch Sheets, a national prayer and intercession leader, who issued an appeal to pastors not to use the word "judgment" for fear that it would turn off people who needed comfort and help...discussion of last Tuesday's events needed ..carefully
balanced grace and truth."
With Christian brothers like Falwell and Robertson, who needs enemies? For if indeed the terrorists were God's instrument for delivering this terrible judgement, why denounce them for doing His bidding? Would this not be agreeing with Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, that the USA was reaping its just oats? Knowing what we know now, would we have regarded Moses in the Bible as a terrorist for being God's instrument for smiting the Egyptians with several plagues for not letting His people go? Did Christ Himself not ask whether those on whom a tower fell were more sinful than those luckier ones who survived, and his answer was "No"?
Let us all pray for wisdom in this hour of tribulation, to mourn with those who mourn first, and ask questions later, much later.
Condolences Condolences to the families of the Dead, and to the rest of the Living, may the rest of your lives be purposeful.
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