The bombings in London today were kind of scary. I guess what concerns me the most is that it was a coordinated attack. I thought the major terrorist organizations had been dismantled to the point where they couldn't pull something like that off.
On the positive side, I am impressed at how well the people there are taking it. In interviews, so many of them appear to feel that, yes, they were attacked, and they will go on with their lives. That's good, because as they say, the terrorists win when you can't continue to function.
Well, it's probably quite a bit easier for them to function considering they've had to deal with this kind of stuff before. The whole reason there aren't trash cans in the tube stops is because they were a favorite place for IRA bombs.
I think if there was another attack in the US around the size of the attack yesterday in London, we would return back to "normalcy" within a very short time. I believe 9/11 has such a long lasting effect on the American psyche for two reasons. It wasn't in most peoples realm of possibilities to be attacked by a terrorist organization like that, and the scale of the attack was so massive.
I'm not sure most americans would return back to normalcy as easily as the Brits if the same kind of coordinated attack were to happen again here, although I guess it would depend on the number killed.
My friend in London said they had the trains and busses running again within a few hours. The tube would take longer due to the cleanup.
As an expatriated American in the UK, even he said the Brits are extremely well prepared for such attacks and emergencies as they've been dealing with terrorist attacks for many, many years.
Unfortunately, you can't really "dismantle" terrorists. So long as you leave even a few of the zealots alive, they will secretly grow again. And it's impossible to find them all.
Well I would like to add here that I was on vacation with my wife and 19 month old son in London at the time, visiting my wife's brother who has been living and working there for two years. On the morning of the bombs between 7:00 a.m. and 7:45 a.m., we were all on the subway system (not the trains that were bombed) going from Angel Station to Waterloo Station for a high speed train to Paris. We caught our train to Paris at 8:15 a.m, and actually didn't find out about anything until my brother-in-law turned on his cell phone the next morning and found 24 messages. We returned to London by train the next evening in a very somber mood.
Being close to the event, I didn't feel it so much as a news story, but as a surreal experience. I was uplifted to see the British spirit of resilience, but I was also extremely sad about all of the MURDERS. I try to be an optimistic person, but at that moment I was actually ashamed to be a human being. Humans are the most "successful" species on the planet, and we do have the potential to do good things. But there is something in us, an evil, homocidal pathology, that is infinately worse than all of the other animals on the planet combined.