personal

When I made my post yesterday just before leaving work about the bridge attack scare, I wasn’t yet very sure how seriously to take it. The time is ripe for scares and hoaxes, and since the only evidence I had at that point was a printed e-mail message, I was a little hesitant to take it at face value. However, judging by reports in this morning’s news (West’s Suspension Bridges Reportedly Terror Targets), I guess the alert is real enough. No new information has developed over the day, apparently — I guess we’ll just have to pay attention to the news tonight to see if anything happens.

Whether or not anything happens, I’d say the terrorists are doing a damn good job at this point. Whether it’s airplanes, anthrax in the mail, or bridges blowing up, nobody really knows where to look next, what to expect, or who’s the next to be targeted — and everybody’s tense. At this point, I’m not sure that terrorists would even need to actually cause any more physical damage or deaths, at least for a while — just leak a threat every few weeks, vaguely worded but with just enough detail to put people on alert, and watch the United States collectively freak out. People get nervous, politicians panic, and sooner or later, we’ll become a totalitarian police state — we’ll just be doing it under the combined banners of ‘democracy’, ‘patriotism’, and ‘safety’.

The WTC/Pentagon attacks killed around 5,000 people. The paranoia after those attacks is killing everything the U.S. has puportedly stood for over the past 200 years. Yeah, I’d say the terrorists did — and are doing — a pretty good job.