| Friday, April 2, 2004 |
11:38 - I've seen things, I've seen them with my EYES
http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/003577.html
|
(top)  |
It's always rather dangerous to develop knee-jerk reactions to some proposed or current action with only words to go by, without the benefit of visual aids.
It took the nonstop video coverage of the towers burning to galvanize us all over 9/11-- without the visual record, without the images burned into our brains, how many of those American flags would we have seen flying from freeway overpasses in subsequent days and weeks? How many people would have stayed home from work in terror at what might happen next? How likely would we have been to read that "The World Trade Center buildings in New York City were destroyed today in a terrorist attack, and 3,000 people lost their lives" and conclude just from those sterile words on paper that this was something that affected all Americans and indeed all citizens of the world, and that it meant the Islamosphere would have to be reformed above all other priorities? Indeed, without going back to someone's photo-blog record or final photos before being crushed under falling concrete, the event rapidly abstracts itself away into our subconscious, allowing us to discuss related matters like the appropriate response and likely causes, without being paralyzed by the elephant in the living room. In that sense it's a good thing, our brains' ability to numb itself. But it can work against us too.
For instance, these are the guys who were killed in Fallujah; this is what they looked like afterwards.
(And this is what the author of the most widely-read Left-leaning blog on the Net says about the matter. It's as sickening as the photos in the latter link.)
... You know, this whole thing was supposed to be leading up to this link, where Bill Hobbs shows us exactly what the idyllic Alaskan wilderness looks like where Bush and his minions plan to drill for ooooiil, in some kind of dastardly evil scheme to make America more self-sufficient and less invested in the Middle East, and destroy some virgin Alaskan paradise to boot, the bastard!
...But it all seems very anticlimactic after the first couple of examples I gave. A reader recently pointed out that I have a tendency to sidle up to a topic, Riverdancing back and forth through vaguely related supporting items until I arrive at the point I'm trying to make, which apparently is a cool thing. Well, yeah, but it has a downside. Sometimes the dancing-around-the topic gets out of hand, and overpowers the main point, as you see here.
Ah well. I guess we've all learned something here today.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
