Well, I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now about today’s attacks in New York and Washington, so I’ll refrain from rehashing it all (though if you’d like a refresher, or want to check for any new information, here’s a link to CNN’s Special Report on the events).
What’s really starting to worry me is just where this is all going to end. Too much has happened in too short of a time, and I’m starting to get mildly paranoid about seeing it all blow up in our faces — maybe a little more literally than I’d like.
First off, the mind-numbing attack, involving coordinated hijacking of four airplanes, three of which found their targets, severly damaging the Pentagon, and utterly destroying three buildings of the World Trade Center (and a fourth looks ready to go as I write this). Then, just about 45 minutes ago, reports started hitting CNN’s TV feed (though I’ve not yet seen much mention of this on their website) that there are explosions in Afghanistan, a country known to have harbored bin Laden — the terrorist most strongly suspected of masterminding today’s attacks. The U.S. is currently denying that these are U.S.-led counterstrikes (which makes sense to me — it seems a bit soon for us to be retaliating in force, without clear and definite knowledge of who we should be retaliating against), but it’s certainly not helping the international situation in the least.
Popular sentiment is rather ugly at the moment, also. Understandably enough, given the strength of the emotional response this soon after the attack, but if left unchecked for long, it could get really frightening. I’ve been following two threads on the Home Theater Forum, and it’s taken some work on the part of the administrators to keep it from degenerating into revenge-motivated hate mongering.
Even some articles I’ve found links to around the web make me nervous — for instance, while I have no idea what the general stance of the site The Ornery American is (I have yet to dig through their site), their article Can We Win This War? starts out with statements I had no problem agreeing with (“America’s leaders are calling for patience, for a measured response to the acts of war we suffered on 11 September. They are right.”), but by the end of the article, they seem to be crying out for an all-out dive into World War III. This is the kind of thing that really starts to get me scared.
Is this the proverbial beginning of the end?
I certainly hope not, it’s just far to easy for my (possibly over-)cynical mind to see retaliation after retaliation build up until we’re far past the point of no return, never having noticed when that point arrived and we passed it by.
My thoughts and prayers certainly go out today — not just for the unfortunate victims and families of victims of the attacks this morning, but for an, if not peaceful, than at least less-than-cataclysmic resolution to this entire affair.