Well, um.
I thought it was a good piece, and/but I agree with Little White Wolf that it wasn’t exactly funny or satirical.
Everybody will remember 9/11 forever, I guess. I was on a bus on my way to a Computer Administrator course when I first heard someone saying something about “Twin Towers”. When I got to school, we were supposedly studying Web Design, and the instructor kept at it, as if nothing were happening. I thought he was being a bit cold about the whole thing. In any case we students all had internet access and were on the CNN website, and completely ignored him as events unfolded. At lunch we went to a bar and watched CNN on T.V. After lunch we went back to class and ignored the instructor again as we watched CNN on our computers.
Everyone was worried that all kinds of bad things would happen in every city. In my case, I was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and it’s an oil capital kind of place, with tall buildings, so people were antsy. Kept going, though. What do you do?
What makes me think it is a good piece is that very “What do you do?” question that comes up in it… well, reschedule dinner, offer seat sales… and the average person’s (yours in this case) response to it.
I must admit my heart sank a bit when you got into that “smoking is an abomination” thing. I smoke. At this point I certainly wish I did not, but Little White Wolf’s point is also salient. If you were to eliminate all the smoking, as you suggest ought to happen, I guess that would require eliminating all the poor addicted hard-core smokers like myself. I don’t want to be eliminated. I’m eliminating myself just fine, thank you. Nobody is going to last forever, and I bet you that some of the people in the Twin Towers were SMOKERS. I have a vague feeling that the attitude about the smoking that comes up here is kind of like mixing apples and oranges. Terrorist smokers don’t come over to your house and smoke at you, unless you invite them in (like VAMPIRES, ooga booga!). Most smokers that I know are either hanging out at home or standing outside in the snow, freezing to death and socializing genially with one another. We are not terrorists.
It’s a good point you make, though, about smoking killing more people than terrorists; same goes for car accidents and lots of other things, and I think this is relevant to issues about how terrified we really ought to be to, say, travel on an airplane or trust each other generally. I don’t understand some of the security measures that the airlines are putting in place, and I do not think they are worth the time and inconvenience. I can have ONE cigarette lighter but not two, and I cannot have a toe-nail clipper, and I can’t have more than three ounces of mouthwash—and I just got back from Cambodia via Thailand, Hong Kong and Vancouver… all the way, each way, I kept thinking about all the ways that I could have blowed up the plane or nail-clipped someone to death, in spite of all the regulations and delays, had I wanted to.
Bottom line is that most people are nice, the odds are incredibly against anyone being a terrorist. (But I WOULD say that, being a smoker.)
