Were the events of 9/11 in anyway funny ? No.
Was the genuine fear felt by many Americans funny? No.
Was the reaction of America’s leaders in the aftermath funny at times? Yes.
Was the peoples reaction to some of the idiot things said and done in response to the attacks funny? Yes.
I hope that’s what Nava meant.
Is it funny to bring these things up in a serious thread on the anniversary? No.
Geezus are you stupid.
Bombs dropped on cities belonging to countries actively engaged in war with a country ought to be counted as terrorist targets now?
I don’t understand why you could muster the ability to be pissed over the turning down of the generous offer of help your country offered. My niece was an EMS in New Jersey* and her crew got turned down as their help was not needed. She took no insult, she was just sad that more of the victims did not survive to need the help provided.
You come off, as saying turning down unneeded help was an insult. That is Bullshit. Where is your head that you can find fault in this?
I donated blood before Noon that day. Before we found out how little need their would be for blood. It was one more note of despair on that sad, sad day. A seemingly useless gesture on my part. Should I have taken insult that no victim got my blood?
e-logic I understand what you are saying. I even agree to some extent. It was well known that too much of the IRA’s activities were funded by Irish Bars, especially in the NY area. It is shameful and terrible that this went on for all that time. You are correct, America never really understood about terrorism and the funding of it. I noted the same thing years before 9/11 as did my Irish Brother-in-Law.
Nava can you somehow cite the claim about ETA? We do not have a large population of Basques[sup]2[/sup] in this country. This smells of Bullshit to me.
Jim
Yes she is.
Now if I understand this correctly. Nava seems to work for a US company. There was staff attending a 1 day meeting in London who were usually based in Spain. These people were told by their US bosses to stay put in London and not try travel by any means. It is this confusion and over reaction that Nava is talking about when she talks about headless chickens from what I can see.
Hopefully she’ll come in and clarify this but she doesn’t seem to be talking about people in NY in or around the buildings but the reactions of US staff and the effect it had on their people in London.
:rolleyes: No, that was total war you ignorant asshole.
Jackass.
IIRC, we (here in Chicago) went on alert for our disaster plans at work (hospital). I had just been hired (orientation started 9/12) so I didn’t have to go in. Putting any number of health care personnel on standby across the city–but having to go in on a moment’s notice–is not “fun”.
I can see (somewhat) what you’re saying: we WERE rudderless; Bush was reading a book about a goat then flying around, God knows where; Cheyney hit the bunker (I’ll bet he retires there) and wasn’t seen. It was somewhat comic-looking back from the safety of it being a single choreographed event.
We had no way of knowing that, then. I remember going for a run in the neighborhood–it was eerie. My little suburb looked like something out of the Twilight Zone. You only had to see someone on the street to speak to them-no one was rude or uncaring. I overheard two guys say something about a plane and the Pentagon–and went home to see that footage.
And the footage of the people jumping–god, that stays with a person. The cell phone calls home from the plane that hit in PA. 
I put out a candle on my porch, just like all my neighbors did. There was a solidarity there that was not “fun”, but felt good in an odd way (see Whynot’s post). Too bad it came from such a source.
The hate attacks on innocent Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims that followed-some of the doctors I work with, lovely, caring people; spit on and reviled for their skin and their religion. Yeah-that was “fun”. It was a horrible time.
Some say that America lost its innocence with Watergate. I think it lost an aspect of it. I think it was truly lost in events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (remember when no one knew what to call it? There were even debates about how appropriate just numbers may or may not be), if we could even be said to be innocent at all.
The world’s stage is not all that large these days and there are many players. America suffers from a love/hate relationship with most of the rest of the world. We ARE too insulated, too arrogant, and too powerful for our own longterm good. But along with that, we are too giving, too naive and too headstrong, too. For this, some mock and make fun of tragedies that we suffer. We are no more to “blame” for the IRA and the ETA than Muslims are for 9/11. Yes, money was funneled–if not from here, it would have come from somewhere else because such groups always find a way to get funding. But we can’t help being insulated in some ways–in Europe, 4 hours can take you to several countries and cultures. Here, I’m still in Illinois in 4 hours.
I for one am fed to the back teeth for taking “blame” for my government’s decisions–I have yet to meet a native of another country who is taken to task as Americans are for the decisions that are beyond our control. I don’t hold Brits responsible for Brown’s decisions (or Thatcher’s or Blair’s or Major’s). I don’t bug Mexicans about their crazy President. The Filipinas I know are not reprimanded for the lax treatment radical groups seem to get in that country.
What I am having trouble reconciling is the disconnect between decisions/actions and responsibility. It seems to me (and this may be perception only) that there is a vindictiveness, a malice present in the “told you so’s; and watch the Americans fall apart” from the parts of the world. (not just** Nava**).
This has been meandering and wordy, but I just wanted to say that I would rather have heard an expression of righteous anger from a European regarding this (“you are not immune!”), than to hear that the post 9/11 activities were “fun” to watch. To say that points to a callousness that is frightening to behold. I was not personally effected by 9/11, but I know many who were. My sister lost most of her NY office-Swiss, Brits and Americans.
I’d like to be more concise but work calls.
Those were in countries at war. NYC wasn’t at war to my knowlege. It was out of a clear blue sky. Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a successful event to stop a war. 9/11 was an attempt to stop the American way of life.
Um, 95% of Hiroshima’s victims were civilians. But hey, it wasn’t a terrorist attack because they were at “war,” right? Fuck you.
Here’s a clue for you, fucko, whatever terrorist group flew the planes into the WTC towers has been at war with the US for a very long time.
I’m not going to get into a meaningless tit-for-tat about what terrorist attacks are more devastating, but rest assured, 3,000 innocents dying in an attack isn’t something that only the US has endured.
And I get irritated when I answer seriously and someone says “I don’t think I deserve such an angry response”. Please show me exactly where I displayed so much anger it offended you. Did you even read the rest of my post or just the line that offended you so? The rest of it was explanations on how I feel, not anger at you.
And no, I don’t think your answer helps me much. You’re not someone I considered a sort of friend, as much as anyone can be a friend on the Internet; she is/was. Her position may be being misrepresented but she’s not making it any better with her subsequent justifications.
I keep saying it - is anyone listening? It’s certainly OK to make fun of us! It’s OK to say we overreacted. What I don’t think is OK is Nava’s original statement “Watching Americans run around like chickens with their heads cut off was fun.”
Oh, really, we’re not going to do this, are we? How do you quantify pain? Is it worse to have 3000 people (and that’s a much higher number than any I’ve read) killed all one one day, or tens of thousands killed over a number of years? Is it worse to spend an extra four days trying to get somewhere, or have your children dragged off to join the army before their voices have dropped? Is it worse to explain to your kids why people are jumping out of the windows of a building to their deaths or to come home from school to find your whole family shot in the backyard?
Why does it matter if the killers are “terrorists” or “soldiers”? It’s not like the individuals killed were the ones who declared the war.
They’ve suffered (whoever “they” are), we’ve suffered, can’t we just support each other in our suffering without trying to win the contest?
Right…
Ask al Qaeda how long they’ve been at war with the US…
But that doesn’t count, right? Why, because Congress hasn’t officially accepted it?
Myopic tool.
yojimbo, lalenin and beanpod understand what I’m trying to say.
I can apologize for my posts. I can’t apologize for the coworker who turned the 11 on that September’s calendar into a drawing of the Towers (complete with antennae).
I’ve told this story before. Conversation with a parish priest, years ago
Me: “what’s wrong?”
Him: “ah, I can’t talk about it.”
Me: “saying the sin but not the sinner is ok, remember.”
Him: sigh “you know about Palme’s death last week, right?”
Me: “yes”
Him: “you’re too young to remember, but he actually went out with a coin bank, like for Domund or Cancer Day, and asked people for money to help the guys from ETA who murdered Carrero Blanco” (our VP, in 1973)
Me: “I don’t remember but I’ve heard it mentioned, yes.”
Him: “well, in these last few days I’ve had people who hadn’t had confession in years or decades, who came in to confess that when they heard about him being murdered by terrorists they thought cría cuervos” (the whole sentence is ‘cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos’, ‘grow crows and they’ll feed on your eyeballs’… something like ‘you reap what you sow’)
Me: think “look at it this way - they had the bad thought. But they also had the humanity to realize it was a bad thought to have.”
I said we had a lot of bad thoughts, bad thoughts whose triggers I’ve also tried to explain. I didn’t say that having those bad thoughts was a good thing. I apologize for posting something other than “ouch” on a thread which was expected to be ouch-only.
n/m
Really? That indicates that you didn’t read what was posted on this very board after the Madrid bombings.
That the most hateful, nasty, sickening thing I’ve ever read here happened to be about terrorism in Spain is, however, a coincidence. It doesn’t make the comment any better, and I reckon this pitting is justifiable.
“Fun” was an ill-chosen word, and is indefensible IMO. We had a metric shitload of sympathy, but I will admit that this was followed by a horrified fascination about the US reaction, which was so very different to other countries when under terrorist attack: at first so very, very extreme, then so very, very schmaltzy, then so very, very violent.
But not “fun”.
And WhatExit–your blood was NOT wasted. It went to good use, just not to a direct victim of the attacks.
Yes, some (if not most) of our responses to the attacks were inappropriate and either over the top or not enough. We were unprepared. I’m sorry that we weren’t able to be as prepared as other countries that have suffered this type of thing for far longer. We are awake now (sort of), and we are alert to the danger. Glad our ineptness gave you pleasure, in whatever twisted it way it could. We Americans like to please others. :rolleyes:
Yes. How keeping those poor people in London for a week (the one from my factory had a dependant mother and aunt living with her, both with mobility problems) made them safer was beyond any of us.
Well, the perception was that
for years “Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe” were exactly those people putting their hands in their pockets for NORAID, while British civilians were killed by the bombs bought with that money;
the same “Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe” thought of similar civilians on the end of US military action as “collateral damage”, and cheered the troops as the came home (“USA” USA!")… suddenly they know what it’s like to be collateral damage;
Joe and Jane were happy to remain in blissful ignorance of the price their seccurity and prosperity cost Abdullah Schmoe and Shahista Doe in the middle east, but were outraged when the same violence was visited on them.
PLEASE NOTE THAT I DO NOT AGREE WITH THESE SENTIMENTS!
But that’s the reality, like it or not, for many people around the world when they saw the Towers fall.
You need a new dictionary. IRA, PLO, Al-Quaeda & ETA actions are terrorism. Dresden was warfare. It still sucked, it was still terrible, but it is not the same thing.
However, there have been far too many horrible terrorist attacks, you point would have been better if you did not bring up acts of war. 9/11 was not unique in this.
Jim
The majority of IRA funding came from bank raids, kidnapping and other illegal activities in Ireland and the UK. On of the biggest shipments of guns was given by Libya. The US funds mostly funded prisoners families etc. while in jail. The Brits like to beat you Yanks over the head with this but not only was it a tiny fraction of your population that gave money it also wasn’t the main source of income.
I know that, I was drawing a parrallel to one on **Nava’s ** statements is all.