[thechat] My baseline on all this WTC stuff

[Scott Dexter]

Since I've been pretty quiet until now, let me share my take on this
crisis before I continue. I hope it provides some context to my
responses to other threads. Thanks.

(This was originally sent to someone else, so I'm leaning on the magic
of cut and paste)

I'm fine; the closest person I know personally is spitting distance from
the water at the North end of Manhattan, so he's fine. Just a solemn
stunned feeling. Getting a little tired of the forced rah-rah that's
going around. I love our country, but how much good is flag waving gonna
do? In a strange event, I actually agree with something Charles Carroll
said (he runs asplists.com/learnasp.com): what these people need is
*real* help: blood giving, shelter, firefighting, not so much
pomp-and-circumstance.

It's like when you get punched in the gut and you do everything you can
to not squeal, admit that your hurt, or that you may have ruptured
something. You stand tall, put on that tough-guy facade and taunt. It
can be pompous. It can be an effective tactic and prevent another punch,
but sometimes it backfires, and you get socked again, this time in the
face, just to put you down for good.

I can't say "we had it coming." I will not accept that we "deserved" it.
I can say we've been a fat, arrogant, ignorant American people for a
long time. Prosperity breeds comfort, success brings complacency, and
makes for an easy target. We had our guard down. It sucks. But it
happened. I include myself.

You know what I'm afraid of? We're already beaten. Let me 'splain--

	In the Revolutionary War, the Brits (and French, when they
helped the Queen out) fought on our soil using methods current with the
day: Two rows of soldiers, one in front of the other. When the first row
had fired their guns, they would kneel and reload. This gave the second
row time and line-of-sight to fire their weapons. Alternating like this,
a brigade could move across land quite successfully, provided their aim
was better than their enemies (also participating in the same
techniques).
	A problem arose when these techniques were employed here
--woodlands. Mountains. Streams. Geography completely different than the
fields and open plains of Europe. The Americans had learned to use the
geography to their advantage. Camouflage. Ambush. Guerrilla tactics.
Versus the easy to see, red-clad, slow moving targets, it was no
contest. England was up in arms over the 'violation' of modern war
tactics, that the Americans weren't playing fair. And England got
spanked.
	--Sound familiar? Today's accepted war rules say that you attack
a *country*. That a well-defined, /military/ foe is your target. What
well-defined target is a group of 30 or so zealots?

It will be a difficult task to define the person(s) that comprise the
Enemy in this crisis. My fear is that in the middle of our whining that
They didn't play by the rules, They'll continue to play, and be
successful.

I don't have an answer (I would be surprised if any one person does at
this early stage, given the amount of information known and not known).
But I'm not happy, and not sure of the next couple months.

The first (okay, very close second) thought through my mind when I saw
the towers come down: Where are the computer centers, and what about all
that data? 

Are we headed towards an economic spike (byproduct of going to war), or
depression (byproduct of uncertainty)?

Waiting in a funk,
sgd
--
work: http://ti3.com/
non: http://thinksafely.org/