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The real wake-up call
It is stunning to see aerial footage of entire residential sections of New Orleans under water up to their roofs. A city literally submerged in water. The thought occurs that terrorists around the world are inspired out of their minds by the sight that they are seeing, the sight of a famous American city destroyed and rendered uninhabitable, with officials and relief efforts in such disarray, with the looting and the firing at helicopters, with the world’s premier First World country reduced to the Third World. The event fills the jihadists with images of glorious destruction, and renews their ambition to do the same to cities much larger than New Orleans, and so bring America to its knees. Yet the complementary thought also arises, that this terrible disaster may really be, at long last, our wake-up call. Whatever we may think of the people, politics, and culture of New Orleans, we are all of us looking at this and thinking, if this natural disaster could happen to one city, then an unnatural disaster—a dirty bomb, say—could happen to my city, to other cities, to several cities at once. It could happen to Washington or New York. The World Trade Center was a 16-acre area. New Orleans was a city of 500,000. So for the first time, the worst is not just an idea that we think about but don’t expect to happen. The worst is reality. It’s happened. It could happen again, and on a much greater scale.
So, even as the Muhammadan warriors are rubbing their hands and thinking up new ways to smuggle a dirty bomb into San Francisco, or a chemical weapon into Buffalo, or a nuclear bomb into New York, perhaps we will finally become serious about defending our country. Email entry |