September 15, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE: Over at our unofficial companion site, InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds has inaugurated what he calls the "Retail Support Brigade." Translation: Readers who shop. These aren't insensitive materialists, either. The inaugural member is Ananda Gupta, known to Scene readers as the person who first put me on to the Amazon Red Cross campaign. (See the new button to the left.) Joining the Brigade from this site is reader Matt Bruce, who writes:

You'll be happy to know that Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco was packed with people today. I don't normally go to malls on weekends - this was the fourth time I've been to the Galleria—but today I saw more people and fewer parking spaces than any time other than right before Christmas.

American flags were everywhere, including one in a display window at the Giants' Dugout Store, partially obscuring an orange Barry Bonds poster with the caption "BONDS AWAY."

At Macy's I got a wedding gift for a friend. By pushing a few buttons on a display kiosk and swiping my credit card through the reader, in just seconds I was able to get bath linens shipped to Rhode Island. (The wedding is in three weeks; I greatly look forward to flying cross-country assuming the FAA still lets us.) Come to think of it, the technology that lets people do this is mindboggling. It's one of the things I love about this country, something all the more amazing to think about in light of the carnage.

I wish more people understood that the way to live through this is just to do what we always do. In the baseball world, Mark McGwire had some comments that I strongly disagreed with. On the other hand, stories like this really make me admire American ingenuity and focus. "It was up to me to be there and pitch... it was my job."

In other news of the defiant return to normal life, Steve bought lots of comics at the great (and not scuzzy) Zeus comics store in our neighborhood. And my nephew in South Carolina had a birthday party. [Posted 9/15.]

GOD DID IT, PART II: Reader Randall Parker calls my attention to this Worldnet Daily article by Anthony C. LoBaido, which makes Jerry Falwell's offensive theodicy look sophisticated and kind. A small sample:

Is New York the head of the "Great Satan"? All that is evil in the world can be found in New York: MTV, the United Nations, the U.N. abortion programs, the Council on Foreign Relations, New Age Church of St. John the Divine, Wall Street greed, Madison Avenue manipulation and of course more confirmed AIDS cases than the rest of America combined. Let's remember the filthy sodomite gay parade last summer in New York. Let's remember all the New York politicians falling all over themselves to praise this sick spectacle.

And let's not forget that New Yorkers elected—by a landslide—the openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic Hillary to a Senate seat. All while fully knowing what she was all about.

So are we all innocent here in New York? Are we innocent with our porno, drugs, filthy Jay Leno monologues, our idolatry, materialism and consumerism? Innocent when Republican Governor George Pataki stands next to the blood-stained dictator of Communist China as he rings the opening bell for the stock market on Wall Street?...

Can the remnant in America help but honestly ask themselves: Is this the fulfillment of Revelation chapters 17 and 18 (Mystery Babylon) or has God raised up Shiite Islam as a sword against America?

"GRAB MY HAND": A moving account of escape from the World Trade Center's building 7, by a young Pakistani who owes his life to a Hasidic Jew, is here. [Posted 9/15.]

GREAT PHOTOS: The stock photo site Framerate has posted pictures taken by photographer John Labriola from inside the World Trade Center right before its collapse. Labriola,who was on the 71st floor when the first plane hit, barely escaped. He tells his story here.

A great photo I haven't seen elsewhere is this A.P. shot of the memorial at Oracle Corp., whose own towers are the most prominent landmarks in Silicon Valley. The company lost seven employees in Tuesday's attacks.(Thanks to reader G. Barto for finding the direct link so I could stop violating copyright.)[Photo 9/15.]

POWER RANGERS VS. EGGSHELLS: My friend Lisa Snell, the director of the Reason Public Policy Institute's education and child welfare program, sends the following piece, titled "What the Schools Teach Children About Terrorism." She writes not as a policy analyst, though she is one, but as a mother of two little kids.

I have a three year old and a five year old and I want them to feel safe. Having said that, the media coverage of the impact of the terrorist attacks on America's children is sickeningly trite and leaves one with the impression that our school children are extremely coddled. I have been following Education Week's coverage of the terrorist attack "Terror Touches Schools," which has collected newspaper stories about terrorism and children from around the nation. Every major newspaper in the country has run a story on how teachers should respond to children. From the NEA's "Crisis Communication Guide and Toolkit" to the cadre of child-development specialist and grief counselors being called to service at elementary and high schools—the consensus seems to be that "eggshell stepping is best." School children should be protected and reassured that they are safe. The best advice is to turn the television off and try to return to a sense of normalcy. However, the realities of early dismissals, television bans, and the strange behavior of their parents and teachers make it perfectly clear to children that the adults do not feel safe. Security above all else is the most important theme perpetuated in our schools.

Perhaps schools have been protecting kids for too long. The obsession with childhood grief counselors may make some long for the days of climbing under their desk for a duck and cover drill.

My mother-in-law called from Baltimore before 7:00 AM [Pacific] to tell us to turn on our television. My five year old saw the live coverage of the second plane crashing into the WTC. He immediately went and found his Spiderman t-shirt and told me that he and Gavin would not be at school when I picked them up because they were going with the Power Rangers to save the world. He urgently wanted to get to school to call a meeting with Gavin and Tanner, his five-year-old compadres, to decide what to do—a typical reaction from a boy who lives and breathes bad guys versus good guys. People are always talking about how bad television is for children and they seldom talk about how bad their schools are for children. Yet, I would rather be on a highjacked airplane with someone inoculated by Power Rangers than someone who believes the message of every school institution: that weapons are bad and that the authorities and the government will solve all problems and protect you.

Public institutions want children to believe that good guys never use weapons to defend themselves. At my son's "private" school five-year old boys are not allowed to play Power Rangers or Spiderman. Even talking about superheroes is grounds for a "Time Out." In other respects, the private school is a good one—but I have yet to find any other public or private school that is nuanced in any way about guns and violence. The message to children is that all weapons are always bad and that public institutions (like schools) have to protect ordinary citizens from violence. The message is that if people are nicer and more tolerant—if kids learn to respect all cultures, then these bad violent things will not happen.

There were also stories in Education Week's coverage about "lessons" schoolchildren could learn from the tragedy. Reported lessons include geography, lessons about letter writing, and lessons about making civic contributions to our nation.

Sadly, I have yet to see any newspaper or school specialist call for lessons about liberty, about constitutional guarantees, about how these terrorist acts will test fundamental values of freedom versus safety. Schools will not ask schoolchildren to think about how it came to be that only the terrorists had weapons while flight crews, pilots, and ordinary citizens did not.

In fact, schools rarely engage students to think about issues of liberty—it is never part of the curriculum. Perhaps that is why so many national leaders and ordinary citizens (with many exceptions) are so quick to concede that we have to give up many of our prior conveniences, in the name of security. That message is really no different than the standard message we have been taught in school.

The fact that public and private schools have no appreciation for liberty and freedom and that these themes never are discussed in the classroom is one of the most important arguments for parental choice and control of a child's education. It is no wonder that homeschooling is so popular within our community.

TAMA'S PEOPLE GO TO WORK: Tama Starr files another report from Manhattan. Her sign-building crews have now joined the rescue efforts, putting to work the skills that make Times Square such a spectacular place:

The city put out a call yesterday, via the construction unions, for qualified volunteers who can disassemble twisted girders. So my sign hangers and sheet metal workers ran down to sign up, and will work the weekend. It's horrible and dangerous down there, but I envy them. What a dope: twenty years in the business and I never learned to operate a cutting torch. Who ever thought I'd need to? I'm lending equipment, but that doesn't seem like much.

The magnitude of the task is stunning. Each floor of each tower exceeded 40,000 square feet: over two hundred manmade acres jambled together in an area the size of a small town square. The secondary buildings that fell, and are still falling—and are spoken of almost in passing—are forty- and fifty- story edifices. Imagine that on your front lawn. I guess once they determine there is no one still alive underneath, they will stop taking it apart stick by stick and it won't be such a high-skill job.

Crews work through the night. The giant plume of smoke and dust is still rising, glowing blue-white in the searchlights. The thunderstorm that rolled in around midnight Thursday with inches of rain, failed to damp it down. Security at the site (nobody really calls it Ground Zero; that's a media thing) is tight as a wire, especially now that some fools have managed to talk their way in and pull some bad-taste pranks. You can't suppose, with all that talk about zillions of volunteers, that they're letting every well-meaning individual with the desire to "help" go wandering around in the rubble.

Everybody feels a compulsion to "do" something, even knowing that at this point the rescuers are rescuing one another and the authorities are up to their ears in supplies, food, clothing, and plasma. If you aren't contributing something, you're just a consumer, a morsel of Great Satan, like the man says. The sense of helplessness is defeat. It's irresponsible to let faceless forces or even diabolical Evil bomb you back to babyhood. That's why "business as usual," to the extent possible, is more than merely a distraction. People are hoofing it to work where the subways and buses aren't running and the boss doesn't mind if they stay home. During the candlelight stand-around Friday evening it was amusing to see business suits hurrying by, conducting meetings and arguing into cell phones, candle in hand.

Even we defiant types are probably more stressed than we realize. Incredulity is still protecting us. Of all the thousands of people who witnessed the whole scene from their rooftops and windows—the news traveled with the speed of lightning; who needs Verizon?—nobody says anything other than, "I couldn't believe it." It was like watching Mt. Rainier disintegrate: it just doesn't happen.

Sirens are still shrieking (annoyingly, setting off car alarms), and the ear-splitting flyovers have increased—to one almost every ten minutes yesterday (Friday) afternoon. Fighter jets don't have mufflers, which waste power with back pressure on the engine. While it's comforting, looking up, to see that the noisemakers are ours, it's still spooky. The police commish reports close to 100 hoax bomb threats a day: normally, he says, there are only half a dozen.

The weird coincidence of the hip-hop group whose album was scheduled to go to print last Tuesday with a cover showing the World Trade Center in flames—reported at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46771,00.html [and before that, by Glenn Reynolds--vp] —is just that: a coincidence, and trivial. But the "moral equivalency" argument—the group's founder argued for keeping the cover intact because he "wanted people to consider that it is not only foreign terrorists, but the United States as well, that have committed atrocious acts"—is not trivial. And tomorrow's New York Times Magazine, which apparently went to press before all this happened, features an interview with a paranoid old 60s radical defending his view that "Big Brother" America is "not a just and fair and decent place" and praising the "wonderful activism going on internationally" against "global capitalism," the antithesis, he claims, of the "democratic process."

I am all for free speech, so I think these worms should speak as freely as they like—before being sentenced to wear the noise suppression devices that the fighter planes are lacking.

[Posted 9/15.]

FROM AMERICA, FROM PAKISTAN: My brother in Portland, Oregon, sends along the following exchange from members of his Jeep club, one of whom writes from Pakistan. (Bill explains, "It's not really a club, just an email list and he stumbled across our site and joined in a while back despite being in Islamabad.") First, an American "Jeeper" wrote:

Ehsan,
I really like your new photos and the new Jeep graphic at the bottom of your page is real cool. I like that a lot. I hope you keep on Jeepin and your club keeps growing.

I am real sad about the events of this week. So many people are dead. People from all around the world worked in the World Trade Center. People from around the world are dead. There are over 5000 people missing and probably dead. I am sad and mad.

Everyone in the United States came from somewhere else in the world. There is all nationalaties living here. There is a man from Iran that owns a store down the street from me. The US is a very open and free Country. Everyone is free to practice thier chosen religion without worry of persecution. People are free to follow their dreams and better themselves....or not.

Unfortunately this is why it was so easy for people from outside the USA to come here, live here, go to flight school here and learn to fly the planes that they used to kill all of these people.

I am just a person. I try not to be prejudice. I have always taught my children not to be prejudice about skin color or religion and because of that I am proud to say they are not.

Ehsan, I would really like to know your feelings on the resent turn of events at the World Trade Center.

Ehsan, with whom I've had a later correspondence myself, responds with a wrenching note that all too accurately summarizes his country's situation:

Thanx for the mail.... About the WTC... I would like to tell you what majority of Pakistani's feel right now...... When I saw the TV on that day I was shocked.. I saw ppl crying when they heard of the enormous death toll... We were really shocked.. Many Pakistanis also perished in the attacks... I think it is a crime for which all punishment is small.... We are all with the US govt. and the people or America.. A renouned social worker of our country Abdul Sattar Edhi donated 100,000 dollars for the relief actvities in the US... I know that might be a small amount for the US but it is a lot for Pakistanis - 200 persons yearly income-- We would like to do as much as we can.. The Pakistani govt. though has been put on crossroads... We face Civil war if we allow Us to use our bases and/or air space and international war if we dont....

Anyways, I really respect your thinking about prejudice toawrds coloured skin... Hope everyone could feel that way... Thanx for the nice coments for my website... You are welcome if you want to know any thing else...

OUR GOOD FRIENDS THE SAUDIS: Speaking of civilization-vs.-barbarism, our sort-of allies the Saudis are on the wrong side. As Glenn Reynolds reports, they have long been using their riches to export the worst sort of Islam, even to the point of undermining the religious traditions of other Muslim nations. When Chuck Freund was recently in Lebanon, visiting his wife's Maronite Christian family, the march of "Wahabism" was what everyone was talking about. (That and henna, which Lebanese men and women can apparently spend hours discussing.) Reports yesterday from NPR said that two of the hijackers appear to have been former Saudi Air Force pilots who had actually attended exchange programs offered by the U.S. military, one at the AF War College and the other a language school. When I spoke at the Naval War College last year, my escort described their international students as two types: the best and brightest and "somebody's nephew." I'm sure the same is true for the Air Force War College. If this report turns out to be true, I want to know which this hijacker was—and, if it turns out to be the latter (which seems likely), just who the connection was. The Saudi government is illegitimate, decadent, and evil. They are not our friends, and they are at war with our values at home and abroad. Any U.S. response strategy needs to take these realities into consideration. [Posted 9/15.]