Thursday, November 2, 2017

Pondering the Victims

Tuesday was one of those surreal days- I was swamped with work, but was aware that a terrorist attack had been perpetrated in Lower Manhattan. After the initial reports, I switched the car radio to a music station for the ride to work because I really don't like to be inundated with speculation, misinformation, and malinformation. Better to wait until the basic facts are known, and catch up with the news later.

The real horror, as opposed to the terror, of terrorist attacks on soft targets is that the victims are usually people who are just out minding their business, going to work, or having a good time at a concert or a festival. In this latest attack, I am particularly saddened by the deaths of the five Argentine high school friends who had come to NYC with other classmates for a class reunion. Two local men and a Belgian woman were also killed, a testament to the international appeal of my beloved New York City (second only to the City of Y______ in my heart).

In contrast, the perpetrator was a violent fuckup who became radicalized- thankfully, he was too incompetent to arm himself with more than a paintball gun and a pellet gun for his post-motorized rampage stand. Thankfully, he was also too stupid to begin his rampage at night, when the streets are full of hundreds of thousands of Halloween revelers.

4 comments:

mikey said...

Meh. I frankly have little sympathy.

The US has been slaughtering Arab Muslims for decades, and beating her chest and crowing about being AT WAR!!!

Well, it's a funny thing about war. The enemy gets to shoot back. We have destroyed entire countries, destroyed millions of lives and created millions more young people who's entire lived experience is being killed by Americans.

If we are going to rend our garments every time they fight back, maybe we should reconsider our generational 'war'. It's massive one-sided as it is, but they aren't going to stop killing us when they can.

Live with it, or end it...

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

three quarters of the fatalities are foreign visitors, and 'mikey' is going on about how the revenge of arab muslims (by the way, uzbeks are not 'arabs') against americans is more or less justified? even trump is less stupid than that

mikey said...

Heaven knows that when we flattened Baghdad in 1991 and again in 2003, when we blew Faluja off the map not once, but twice, when we destroyed Raqqa in order to 'liberate' it, when we killed thousands of people in Mogadishu in one day in '93 or dropped cruise missiles on al-Shifa in Sudan in '98 we were very careful not to kill any Uzbekis, because we're the fucking good guys...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Of course, New York was the scene of massive antiwar demonstrations in the runup to Iraq and voted heavily against Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. It's an odd place to fight back in a war for revenge. I'm not disputing the blowback angle, though. It's long past the time we end the 'shooting war' against an ideology and ramp up the worldwide investigative and law enforcement campaign we should have conducted in the first place.