November 26, 2001
From the desk of Jane Galt:The New York Post reports
The New York Post reports that the terrorists on Flight 93 deliberately crashed the plane when it became clear that they weren't going to make their objective.
Profanity is too weak.
I suppose I must have known this, somehow, and objectively there's no reason that crashing the plane into the ground is worse than crashing it into the White House -- except that it's so futile. When they crashed the plane, even in their own minds, they weren't freedom fighters trying to stage a vivid demonstration -- they were just trying to kill a lot of people because they could.
The biblical sense of justice in me says that the appropriate response is to take their families, stick them in a plane, and crash it. I have no doubt that this would effectively end terrorism against the US.
But the civilized part of me (which I hope is much harder) recoils in horror from the innocent wife or child of a terrorist experiencing what our people did. Which is why we can never do it. Because we are civilized. Because we are civilized, we don't even entertain the notion in any serious way.
I get nearly as much of a sense of biblical justice from the fact that although our civilized nature is what made it easy to hit us, it is also what will allow us to prevail against barbarians hiding in caves.
Posted by Jane Galt at November 26, 2001 08:52 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links