posted on October 15, 2001 10:52:18 AM new
Well I have settled into a new way of life as I am sure many millions of Americans have. LIVING SCARED. At this point it is safe to say a biological attack is presently being used against us, our leaders and our media outlets. To hell with selling, what I have going will be it until things take a turn for the better if they ever do. The day has arrived when the enemy is invisible yet more potent than any threat you can see. What will happen tomorow? The next day? So on, so forth. I hope will will all feel normal and happy in the seasons and years to come. I know this wont happen today.....
posted on October 15, 2001 11:24:52 AM new
Eventer:
micmic66:
Don't drink the water.
Don't breathe the air.
Don't eat food that you haven't grown yourself.
No wait, they may have been watered with tainted H2O. drats.
Don't eat anything.
Don't leave the house.
Don't get the mail.
Don't answer the phone.
Don't answer the door.
Don't turn on the TV.
Don't bathe or shower.
Don't brush your teeth.
Don't read AW threads.
Before you know it, you'll wish you were dead.
posted on October 15, 2001 11:30:34 AM new
I am sorry the constant repetition of the recent troubling news has got you scared and down.
One of the things I try to do is ask myself, "SO, what can I do about it?" Then I do what I can, and then go on to other things.
I participated in AFA, and complained about it, too, and have kept up with the happenings. But I also made a point to travel into the city, shopped and went to the movies, went to visit old friends, and in general didn't let the bast***s get to me.
I welcome money orders from Florida, New York and Reno, and will be doing some traveling later this week. The odds of being directly impacted are so small I really don't worry about it. Besides, I have always been an alert and aware street person while most of the people around me have been oblivious.
So get out, maybe to a nice bookstore and look for something positive to balance the negativity on tv, radio and the papers. Life does go on, and so keep posting auctions, and your comments.
posted on October 15, 2001 11:31:30 AM new
For those of you who may have seen my now departed post, let me publically state it was NOT meant as anything but a play on words, as in MOM (mother, parental unit, etc).
posted on October 15, 2001 11:39:48 AM newWhat will happen tomorow? The next day? So on, so forth.
Do you usually have knowledge of these things?
the enemy is invisible
Was the enemy more visible before or were we just in denial?
"Normal & Happy" is within your own power.
Make it so.
posted on October 15, 2001 11:43:50 AM new
I'm not so much worried about biological/chemical warfar as much as the Psychological Warfare that is evidentally quiety being waged against us.
Slowly we can sit and watch everyone become paranoid to the point of immobilization. We can't open our mail, we live in fear of white powder, we have to determine whether some Middle Easterners look shifty or are itching to hop aboard a crop duster, we all need to become kamakazi ninjas to ride on commercial airliners...it goes on and on. All because we have convinced ourselves we have to live in fear. Well, I'm not.
Someone on another thread said when your number is up it's your time to go. I think a lot of the 9/11 *coincidence* stories support this theory. All those who missed earlier flights that day, didn't make it to work for some reason or another...etc, etc. My point being - live each day fully, appreciate what you have.
Unfortunately terrorists want to make a point, maybe two points. First to take lives for what they believe is true and secondly to leave those who are left behind in utter desperation and fear. It's all part of their little mind games to take us down - both physically and psychologically.
I sympathize with those who are scared, insecure and unsure - I, too, was that way for about a week after 9/11. Now I am just angry and resolved NOT to let a small group of terrorist jerks make me a prisoner in my own home, not let me support my country economically, not let me have the freedom to go about my life as I did before all of this happened.
Giving up and shutting down is not helping any of us.
posted on October 15, 2001 12:18:02 PM new
There is no cincidence or fate. Thousands of people miss a flight, or miss work each day. For every plane that crashes, there is someone who was going to be on that plane that wasn't. For every tragedy that happens at a workplace, there is someone that was supposed to be there that wasn't.
Even when tragedy doesn't strike, there are people that miss flights and don't go work.
There are Macro-economic forces at work due to the terrorists attacks, as well as an economy that was moving into Recession before 9-11-01. There is going to be economic pain and changes.
Anthrax in the mails ? Don't worry about it. If you have suspicious mail that you MUST open, wear gloves and open it inside a plastic bag.
Getting Anthrax spores on the skin is rarely lethal. Breathing it can be if you get enough of it in your lungs, or have a weak or compromised immune system.
However, getting exposed to a powder from an envelope is enough of a warning that you can get antibiotic treatments in plenty of time.
The more I analyse the terrorist attacks here in the U.S., the more it seems that we were as much a victim of our own lax security percautions than the victim of a powerful terrorist network. If the terrorists had the ability to hit us hard again, they would have by now.
Think about it. A mentally ill person could have done the same things with airplanes prior to 9-11, provided he/she had flight training.
Another Timothy McVeigh could have and may be mailing the Anthrax.
Like I said, these attacks are going to bring about changes, it can't be helped.
The U.S. can button down the country to make it almost, but not completely, safe from terorist attacks. But it will have economic and political costs, some of which we are already feeling.
So what do we do ? I suppose the same things Americans did during the Civil War, WWI, the Depression, WWII, the Cuban Missile crisis, and Three Mile Island.
Just keep on truckin'. Between the military, financial, and domestic actions the government is taking, I look for things to be on a "normalized" pace by the first of the new year, provided we locate our enemies and cripple them.
posted on October 15, 2001 01:35:16 PM new
The day you were born your body has been fighting the "evil" evaders known as bacteria, fungus, and virus's. It's just a fact of life that "evil" will try to take over.
Terrorists are like a bacteria, and our defense won't be perfect but it will prevent most of it from evading our society. Since you've likely learned to adapt to the bacteria all around you, surely you can adapt to terrorists.
posted on October 15, 2001 01:54:32 PM new
We have had Terrorism for 100 years. An interesting UK view courtesy www.sunday-times.co.uk.
October 14 2001 TERRORISM
PANIC ATTACKS: Fear in the air as concern rises over biochemical attacks
Andrew Sullivan, Washington
False alarms
THE LAST words of America's national anthem invoke the land of the free and the home of the brave. But these days, it seems, Americans are close to panic.
Well, wouldn't you be? On Thursday the entire country was informed by its government that there were credible threats of terrorist attacks in the next several days. They gave us no details. They just scared the bejeezus out of us.
Everyone has a story. Walking through Washington, I saw two dead pigeons in the street. Another bird was in spasm. My immediate thought was not: has the city finally got its pest control working? It was: is this a biochemical attack in which birds die first?
I'm not the only one with the jitters. In Washington a man dropped a bottle of liquid during an altercation with police. A month ago you wouldn't have thought twice about it. This time the subway was closed and 21 people were quarantined as the emergency services hurtled in, suited up like spacemen against biochemical weapons. Sure, the liquid turned out to be nothing more hazardous than cleaning fluid - but you just don't know.
In Florida a man died apparently from opening a letter. Deadly anthrax spores were found on his office computer keyboard and in the mailroom. Another man and a woman at American Media, where the victim worked, were infected, and one had worked in the mailroom. Last night, a letter sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada, tested positive for anthrax. Random death by postcode is not something anyone is prepared for.
Gamblers have deserted Las Vegas casinos
Try as the authorities might to convince people there was no link to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the sheer nagging amorphous threat set nerves jangling. Sightings of strange powders and liquids, previously not worth a second glance, sparked panic.
At a clinic in Palm Beach, Florida, it turned out to be plaster dust. At the University of Florida it was talcum powder. In a town called Davie it was fire extinguisher residue. Rumours about weird deaths in remote cities keep circulating - strange envelopes in the hallway, dead rats in the alleys. Friends working in skyscrapers are looking for new jobs. One, who used to keep his window open at night, now keeps it sealed for fear of terrorist crop-dusters.
Airport queues are endless and my laptop was detained by security for days last week. In the Dulles airport departure lounge, surrounded by military guards, I felt ashamed to be nervously watching a turbaned man fumble through his case. He was looking for his cellphone.
Thousands of people are buying Cipro, the antibiotic that may or may not work against anthrax. Chemists have sold out in Washington. It doesn't seem to matter that by the time you find out you've been poisoned by anthrax it's too late for Cipro.
Even staffers at my magazine, The New Republic, are jumpy. Nobody wants to work in the mailroom. Maybe, just maybe, they have a point.
Friday brought news that a woman at NBC News had been infected on her skin with a milder but still unnerving form of anthrax. The envelope containing the powder, postmarked September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey, was addressed to Tom Brokaw, NBC's news anchor, and contained traces of anthrax. A second letter to him postmarked from Florida on September 20 proved harmless.
Seemingly just as disturbing were mysterious envelopes with substances in them delivered to the State Department and The New York Times. The latter's envelope was sent to Judith Miller, a writer who has fearlessly chronicled the Islamic fundamentalist threat.
For hours the building was closed down as tests were made for biochemical agents. It proved to be harmless.
None of this is rational, of course. The chances of any random American dying in the next year from a terrorist attack is far smaller than his or her likelihood of dying in a car accident or from a heart attack. Biochemical warfare is extremely difficult to carry out on a large scale; and, so far as we know, Al-Qaeda does not yet have nuclear weapons.
The world's worst terrorist attack was horrific, but it murdered only 0.002% of the American population.
But the point of terrorism, of course, is not rational. Its intent is to instil irrational fear and paralyse societies by random terror. The terrorists succeed when people stop travelling freely, or shopping, or believing that terrorism cannot be defeated. They succeed when fear depresses economies, creativity and humour and all other aspects of a free society that terrorists loathe.
So far this hasn't happened in America. But the country is on a knife edge. Americans aren't like Britons. They have a long history of requiring almost risk-free living, which is why this is the land of the trial lawyer and the damages suit.
A country that came up with a tort for the accidental spilling of hot coffee will no doubt have some difficulty acclimatising to a world where the deliberate spilling of anthrax spores is a real danger. On a deeper scale, Americans have little experience of living with homeland terrorism and have never had a war visited on their continent that they didn't start themselves. The last time there was a physical threat to the White House was at the dawn of the 19th century.
This amazing legacy of security leads inexorably to a lack of experience with stoicism. Stoicism isn't the same thing as fortitude or nerve. Americans have plenty of those qualities. Faint-hearted people don't venture into a new continent with nothing but a few wagons and shotguns. Nervous types don't storm the beaches at Normandy.
Stoicism is another matter. It's the endurance of things you cannot immediately fix or alter. It's the stiff upper lip of the British. Americans aren't used to this. It's not a failing. They see a problem and their first response is not to endure it but to fix it. This refusal to accept the enemy's terms might be called naive. But it certainly isn't defeatist.
In the face of a seemingly intractable problem, it is almost part of the American psyche to keep tackling it.
For this reason, perhaps, Americans are already adjusting. The papers are full of burly men saying they will overwhelm any terrorist who tries it on in an aeroplane. And by all accounts that's exactly what happened on one of the suicide flights when it dawned on some passengers that they had become a guided missile.
Above all, the quintessential American response to the problem - fixing it - is being conducted in the mountains of Afghanistan and beyond.
But there's a nervous edge to this ebullience. What if there really is another strike? It would transform America perhaps more than the first one. It would result in a popular demand that whatever war is now being conducted be extended and pursued with an aggression we have yet to see.
Stoicism, remember, is a response to helplessness. And although they may be scared, Americans are not used to feeling helpless. They have no intention of starting now.
Next page: False alarms
False alarms
Next: Tapes reveal poison plan
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This page is provided by www.sunday-times.co.uk on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Sunday Times, visit the Syndication website.
posted on October 15, 2001 03:23:51 PM new
My post regarding another post is removed, yet an entire thread which has 0% to do with eBay is allowed to continue in the eBay outlook. Did I miss something?
posted on October 15, 2001 05:31:13 PM new
Ever since 9/11 I have been so angry that I catch myself grinding my teeth.
That we have become worried enough to even discuss it means that he is winning. He said we will fear all over our land and we are allowing him to be right.
How can we not fear the unknown? How can we not look at our neighbor in a different, less trusting way? How can we not hold our family a little too close?
This morning, my wonderful husband said he was worried about even going to dinner at his favorite smorgasboard because it would be so easy for some lunatic to sprinkle something on the food without anyone noticing. I have never known him to be worried or afraid of anything.
This all makes me so angry. This fear takes away from our freedom and that I cannot abide. I will go on with my life and do as I always have and put my life in God's hands.
Just today, in a small college town close to me, a college student said he received a package with a powdery substance. They closed the PO in the town and had all kinds of Hasmat people there. These out of town very rich college kids have run at least one hoax on every national story since I can remember. If this too is a hoax, I hope they hang the little bugger.
posted on October 15, 2001 06:32:57 PM new
Well, it was absolutely brilliant on the part of whoever it was that decided to send the anthrax DIRECTLY to the media. What better way to ensure that it would get immediately reported to the public, creating a panic?
In my opinion this is basically just a scare tactic! DON'T let it get to ya!
posted on October 15, 2001 07:41:59 PM new
That's exactly what it is, CAgrrl.
These letters are being sent to the news media because the senders will be assured of complete media play.
Big bang for little bucks. Few casualties, but as much airplay as if they'd orchestrated something much bigger.
Yet, despite knowing full well that the perpetrator(s)' sole intent is to scare the bejeezus out of the entire population, the media micro-reports 24/7 and naive viewers give the terrorists exactly what they wanted by cowering in the closets and worrying that their damned ebay payments are going to give them anthrax.
I had thought our citizenry was intellectually superior to the chanting Afghani nutcases, but I guess they've gotten another one over on us.
posted on October 16, 2001 10:47:34 AM new
What about the option of living aware? This is what the terrorists are hoping to do, make people afraid. Educate yourself, research about anthrax and other diseases that could be used (e.g., small pox)as a biological weapon. I get nervous too, but I have to slap myself and tell myself to research what I have heard or read. There are approximately 20 (+ or -)people that have been infected out of how many millions of people? Remember the media has said they won't wear American flag lapel pins or have flags hanging in the background because they are reporting the news from the world. They are still in it for the ratings. They are not telling the entire story and it is up to each person to find out what it is. Then they can make up their own mind as to what to be afraid of.
I work in a building where I get carded and my belongings checked each time I enter. Guards are posted at the gate and each person gets carded (and after so many cars, a lucky winner gets their car searched (thoroughly). There are concrete barriers every where because I work in a building that has been deemed one of those that could be a potential target. AND I work in the basement. I already know if something happened (and I believe that is higher than the possibility of me winning the lottery) to the building, I would be killed. There is no doubt. However, I cannot live my life in fear. I have too much living to do and I am not going to allow a bunch of da$% terrorists take my freedom away from me!!!!
posted on October 16, 2001 12:46:38 PM new
Well put LlamaLady!
We just took a mini-vacation and the airports are doing their jobs. The airlines are beefing up security too. Sure, it took a little longer but you darned sure did not here any complaints. National guardsmen in uniform with machine guns strolling down the airport corridors...sure the heck gave us a warm glow. Let the terrorist try to screw with them!
List auctions but know that economically we are in a state of flux. Live life.
posted on October 16, 2001 01:47:24 PM newWe just took a mini-vacation and the airports are doing their jobs...
Well, I hope most are...
I went to Kansas City a couple of weeks ago from Oakland, CA. Got to Oakland's airport at 5:30 AM for a 7:30 AM flight. Hundreds of people in the line to check baggage and hundreds more in the line for security. This was fine but if we would have needed to check baggage we wouldn't have made our flight. The funny part was that my girlfriend got the wand and I sailed through
Leaving Kansas City... I had a big messenger bag and the two young kids asked if they could look through it after it got x-rayed. Being the good patriot I told them to tear it up. They preceded to kinda poke at a few things and then sent it through the x-ray machine a few more times. They looked befuddled. Then they decided it was probably the metal rings in an address book in my bag.
I felt kind of uneasy after that.
Also what's up with the midwest? There was 2 lines with hundreds of people at 5:30AM in Oaktown but at Kansas City airport, when we arrived in the afternoon, it was a ghost-town! Same way a few days later leaving in the middle of the afternoon!?
posted on October 17, 2001 05:47:36 AM newarttsupplies The KC airport is weird. One section will look like a ghost town and when you walk around to another end of the terminal (it curves), it will be so crowded you can't walk. You must have hit it in between a lot of flights. Consider yourself lucky.
posted on October 17, 2001 07:13:06 AM new
LIVING SCARED
No, but more aware of the evil around in the world. Someday it will end, but as W. Bush said, at a time of our choosing, not the terrorist's and the governments that harbour them. They have no idea what they've begun. They are overconfident because they defeated the Soviets. Ten years ago, lots was unthinkable in that conflict. Now, with their attack of Sept 11, public opinion has changed. They should remember many soviet soldiers were mainly conscripts with poor motivation to fight there. The very reason they won was because of their resolve to win against an oppressor. The terrorists have come here and murdered innocent civilians. They have become the oppressors. They will find the resolve of their chosen enemy much different. I have no objection to the use nuclear weapons on the terrorists hiding in their caves if it's needed. Before Sept 11, I would not have agreed to use these weapons.
posted on October 17, 2001 08:37:17 AM newarttsupplies The KC airport is weird. One section will look like a ghost town and when you walk around to another end of the terminal (it curves), it will be so crowded you can't walk. You must have hit it in between a lot of flights. Consider yourself lucky.
I'm not really knocking the midwest. (I'll be a card-carrying member in March when we move ). My girlfriend went to KU and took many Southwest flights to Chicago for years and she was amazed at the lack of life on this trip...
I was also pleasantly suprised by downtown Kansas City, MO. About a 5% chance we'll move there instead of Chicago.
I'm finding there is life between the coasts
[ edited by arttsupplies on Oct 17, 2001 08:37 AM ]
