2001-09-13 - 10:57 p.m.
I swear, if I hear someone say, "Things will never be normal again," one more time, I�ll blow chunks. Guess what--for most of the rest of the world, this is "normal."
One day ten years ago, during my trip around Europe, I and the friend I was traveling with had to catch a train at Victoria Station in London. We got our tickets (or flashed our Eurail passes, or whatever), picked out the platform our train was on, then went to get something to eat. We didn�t make it very far. All of a sudden about a dozen London policemen in their cute (to an American) Keystone Cop helmets cordoned off the station, ushering everyone out and preventing anyone else from entering. Right behind them came a handful of definitely-not-cute-at-all men in fatigues carrying what looked like a large armor-plated beverage cooler. I had no idea what was going on. My friend, who�d been studying in the UK for almost a year, knew right away. "It�s the bomb squad," he said.
It turned out that someone--probably another idiot tourist like me--had left a backpack or something on one of the platforms and that the big cooler-type thing was for the bomb squad guys to put it in while they transported it to a safe location. Later on, maybe, they opened it, saw that it was harmless, then returned it to its owner along with one of those withering lectures Brits are so good at delivering when you act like a complete moron in their presence. More likely they just blew it up without even looking at it. Quite possibly, it really was a bomb.
What struck me at the time was how nonchalantly everyone at the station reacted. No one whined about being late or threatened to sue or did any of the other whingy things you�d see a crowd of Americans do in similar circumstances. I wasn�t surprised (I�d read about the Blitz, and I also knew enough about IRA terrorism and the history behind it to hate everyone involved and wish I could purge every last drop of Irish blood from my ancestry), but I was certainly impressed. At the same time I was relieved I�d be returning to a country where people did bat an eye at scary shit like this.
Well.
Welcome to 2001.
What we were living in before Tuesday wasn�t "normal." I believe the technical term for it is "dumb luck."
These beefed-up airport security procedures are long overdue. (Although as I write this, CNN is reporting that several more people with phony IDs and pocketknives are being pulled off planes at JFK and LaGuardia, even with heightened security. Shit.) I�ll miss curbside check-ins, but I have no problem with getting in my goodbye hugs before I pass through the metal detector rather than after. And the first time I board a plane and see one of those armed air marshals, I might just kiss him. I hope he doesn�t shoot me.
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Go read JerseyGrrl�s account of how she found out about you-know-what--it made me cry. Although hearing Wynton Marsalis play the National Anthem made me cry, too. Whoever this freak is who�s taken control of my tear ducts, I want him to leave.
While you�re at it, read Badsnake�s resolution, too. And someone buy Jerry Falwell a one-way ticket to Kabul for saying this is the fault of the queers and the feminists. If we survive this, we�ll have the Badsnakes and JerseyGrrls to thank, not him. Go get �em, girls.
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I was going to attend tomorrow night�s Padre game with Jeff and Stacey, but there�s no baseball till next week. No problem--I�ve got 500 quatloos saying we wouldn�t have made it to the third inning before someone phoned in a fake bomb threat and we all wound up out in the parking lot. I�ll talk Jeff and Stacey into going out drinking instead. I need alcohol and lots of it this weekend.
More than that, though, I need living human beings--flesh-and-blood ones, not two-dimensional ones on TV or the Internet--to talk to and be alive with. Go and be with your friends this weekend, all of you. In the final analysis they�re all we have.
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