we're still here
I’ve still not fully come to terms with yesterday’s
events. I keep surfing around, poking at CNN for more info,
checking to see if any of the bloggers I’ve been following has any new
information. Occasionally, I scroll down too far, and end up in a post
from the 10th, describing some amusing link, some personal event of
note, or no note, or a news item that would have provoked outrage a
few days ago. Now, it just causes cognitive
dissonance, a buzzing in my head as I try to piece together
the “before” and “after” parts of my world as my jabbing finger hunts
for the “Page Up” button. Periodically, I bounce over to read mail and
Usenet, to read messages of hate and violence, messages of sorrow and
support, calls for revenge, calls for support, and calls for
somebody, anybody, to make sense of it all.
Despite my nominally being “at work”, I produced very little
today. Part of my mind tells me that the best thing I can do under the
circumstances, the right thing, is to carry on, to wait
patiently for the investigators to determine responsibility and to
assign blame, and to try to keep the additional disruptions in my life
to a minimum, to prevent “them” from making any more of an
impact. Most of me, however, keeps roaming the web, scanning Usenet,
reading email, looking for new information, answers, resolution.
I saw a CBS news poll tonight report that 66% of the people
polled would be willing to give up “some basic liberties” to prevent
“this sort of attack” from happening again. Only 24% polled
were “not willing”. (I guess 10% told them “fuck off, you media
vultures”, or something.)
Sixty-six percent. Two thirds of us prefer safety to
freedom. That’s frighteningly high, I think. My primary
concern at this point isn’t catching the responsible parties, or
punishing them, torturing them, sending them on the express route to
hell, or even trying to understand why they’re such miserable nasty
people. I’m sure that some or all of those things will happen in due
course; if Americans are good at anything, it is at making sure the
target of our righteous fury knows that it has been targeted.
No, my thoughts keep turning to the longer term effects that these
attacks are going to have on our society, on the shape of our daily
lives. I’m going to be laying awake at night worrying about the
tradeoffs that we’re going to be forced to make, or bullied into
choosing, or duped into believing in; tradeoffs that will
reduce our personal freedoms for an illusionary and facile
sense of security, a mutually agreed upon fantasy that our
world isn’t really the type of place where somebody can look at a
passenger airplane and think about how good of a weapon it would make
and how much more frightening it would be if the plane was filled with
people as well, and that as long as we carry our luggage inside the
terminal instead of dropping it off at the curb, everything will be
okay, and the boogeymen won’t be able to get us.
It begins, already. Today at work, at the NIH, I had
to display an ID badge to get by a bored rent-a-cop before I could get
on the elevator up to my floor, to my cube. According to the email
that went around early this morning, the rent-a-cop was required to
actually touch my badge, presumably to verify, to somehow
divine that it wasn’t fake. This charade was dutifully
carried out by the morning guard, but by the afternoon, a replacement
guard waved me by with only a cursory glance in the general direction
of my badge. My co-workers all had to run the same gauntlet,
repeatedly, and I’m sure for those of Middle Eastern descent, or even
those having the appearance of Middle Eastern descent, it was
infinitely more uncomfortable that it was for me, a fairly typical
looking white male. This will be continuing “until further
notice”, which I fear is bureaucrat for “forever”.
That security guard had absolutely no effect on the
probability of my building suffering a terrorist attack today. Had he
been there yesterday, he would have had zero impact then as
well. Tomorrow, when I again have to present my badge, it still won’t
make a difference. The difference in badge check procedures between
the morning and afternoon guards today? Meaningless.
I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the Pentagon, and Logan
Airport, and the World Trade Center all had security guards on duty
yesterday, and they weren’t able to prevent tragedy from striking. I
can only infer that the sole function of that guard stationed outside
the bank of elevators in my building was to make people
feel better, to make them feel less worried, less
like targets.
He didn’t make me feel better. He made me feel
annoyed. Annoyed that I was being scrutinized,
examined, because I went to my workplace. Annoyed and
angry that I was being made to display a small piece of
plastic with a bad picture of myself on it, in order to get access to
a place that I’ve been walking into freely for over a
year. Annoyed and angry and sad that because of the
events of yesterday, my personal freedoms were reduced just that
little bit more, another tiny sliver, whittled away. Annoyed
and angry and sad and dejected, because this is a government
building, a building erected by my government, the American
government, which means that it was bought and paid for, and is
maintained by, the taxes of the American people, and at the moment
(and possibly, even probably, forever) the vast majority of those
people, the owners of this building, aren’t allowed into
it. Annoyed and angry and sad and dejected and bitter
because the reduction in my freedom doesn’t, the reduction in your
freedom doesn’t, the reduction in everybody’s freedom doesn’t
make a damn bit of difference if somebody, anybody, the
shadowy “they”, decide to attack us again.
After work today, walking to a pub to meet with friends from all over
the globe to raise a glass to the fallen, I realized that, in
retrospect, one thing I really wished I had had was an opportunity to
vote for John McCain in a presidential election. The less said about
that, the better, most likely.
What should we do? What is the appropriate response?
I’m not sure. At the moment, my stance is reluctantly
hawkish. Reason seems very unlikely to work with the perpetrators of
yesterday’s attacks, so I fear that we will have to fall back on
force; we will have to forcefully make the point that while it may be
technically possible to do this sort of thing to Americans, on
American soil, the final result is a terrible and awful
retaliation. Of what sort, I do not know; how horrible must we
show ourselves capable of being, to drive home the lesson
that Americans are not good targets, not acceptable targets, not
targets of any sort?
The part of my mind that tells me to go about my business, to strive
to live my life in a normal fashion amidst the unthinkable, that part
tells me that violence isn’t the answer here; that
that path twists into a death spiral of increasing devastation until
someone uses a weapon so terrible that our race, our planet, may be
damaged beyond our ability to heal, beyond our ability to
fix. I have no answers to these questions.
In the meantime, even as I revise these thoughts, life
ratchets back into gear. There is fresh spam in my
mailbox. There are people on the Linux lists asking about getting
their video card to support hardware acceleration, about getting PPP
to work, about printing. Over on the incidents list there are network
admins girding themselves in preparation for DDOS attacks from one
side or another. Blogs are beginning to link to items unrelated to the
attacks, and it is possible to get major news sites to load without
delay. People are reaching out, giving blood, giving money, starting
“everybody check in” threads on smaller, more community-oriented
lists, regrouping, assessing loss, reporting that they’re shaken,
scared, but safe, and still here. Life will go on, is
starting to go on. We’re still here, and maybe that’s
the lesson – that despite the worst attack in our history, possibly
in history, period, we’re still here.

I'm still here, and Genehack will resume normal operations on Friday.