Reply #9: the very scary notion... [View All]

[ant]

...that nothing could've been done is something people have a hard time accepting. "Someone should've been able to stop this" comforts us in that it assumes the world is not as chaotic and random as it might be. There are people in charge who can protect us. The reality is that that's just not true.

Could the government have prepared for hijacked airplanes being used as missiles? Of course. It could have also prepared for truck bombs set off simultaneously across the country. It could have also prepared for a contamination of the water supply in several cities at once. There are probably a bazillion different terrorist attack scenarios and it strikes me as simply impossible to prepare for all of them.

What's more, the very essence of terrorism is that it strikes at your weaknesses. We can prepare for X, Y, Z, but that simply means the terrorists will carry out F, G, H. Prepare for F, G, H, and they'll explore B, W, R. You can have general emergency response plans and things like that, but when it comes down to details....

Take the order to shoot down, for instance. While I personally suspect the plane in PA was shot down, I think it's perfectly understandable that those who received those orders were a bit hesitant. It's one thing to shoot a plane down in an open field, it's quite another to shoot it down over a major metropolitan area. So you save the people in the Towers and in the Pentagon - what about those poor souls who are underneath the plane? In that case we'd just have a different set of faces greeting us from the "victims' families" section.

And even all these thoughts are post 9-11. Honestly, the people who run the country are still people, and if you want a clue to what people were thinking I think it's best reflected by that one guy who, when told that they needed F-16s to deal with hijacked planes, replied along the lines of, "is this an exercise or real world?"

Yes, there were breakdowns and there was confusion, and those should certainly be addressed, but there are limits to the precision and effectiveness human institutions can have, especially when confronted with a situation many would've considered simply outlandish just a few hours earlier. It is completely understandable to me that people didn't know what to do or, when they did know what to do, they didn't know how to do it.

The short version of this post is that shit happens and there's not much you can do about it. You can fasten your seatbelt and hit the brakes in time to avoid hitting that kid who darts out in front of you, but then the bus that just ran the stop sign strikes and kills you. Not every horrible thing can be stopped or avoided. That's just life.