Aftershocks

In the aftermath, over the last two days of numbing nonstop television coverage, only a few comments rang clear. One was: "Our security procedures (at airports) have never been based on the supposition that the perpetrators were willing to be blown up with the plane. They have been based on the concept of bombs, not on planes as bombs."

A second: “If we overreact by threatening anyone with brown skin or Middle Eastern-sounding names or of Muslim religion, we are playing into terrorists’ hands by becoming like them." Unfortunately this comment was made late at night. I was up after midnight watching tv with a friend of mine and her husband. "Why don’t they play this over and over again during prime time, the way they are playing that (pathetically staged) ‘celebration’ of the assault by Palestinians?" I asked them. They agreed.