New York under attack again

It's probably best to see this as just the work of a crazy, lone individual, rather than some organized attack. Even a crackpot would recognize that if you want to draw attention to something like this, you would set it up in Times Square and not at the mall in the suburbs. So in that sense I don't think you need to feel that New York is under attack or that they hate us so much. I mean, they hate us, but we're still okay.

In any case, thank goodness they foiled that and no one got hurt.

I read about this in the papers this morning. I HATE the tourists in the NYTimes article who went on and on about how "it's so cool" to see the "spectacle" and it was "worth missing a Broadway show for." Spectacle to you guys, tourists, but for US it's a daily reminder of the fear we live under!

@ajadedidealist That's a sad sad state the world is in, if those dumb tourists thought a boms in a car was "cool"...

@ajadedidealist well said...guess those tourists were excited seeing the bomb squad etc.. but were it not for that alert street vendor the whole thing would have been a huge tragedy for NYC..and sadly many of them would have perhaps been caught in the midst of it...

None of this is cool. People who think this way should watch the Twin Towers going down on their DVD's. They may have forgotten just how uncool that was. I think what they meant was that they were in the midst of the newest news report. Usually everything happens to others and this way they may have felt directly involved.

Well said, @eva. I'm sure it was people who live in miserable places where nothing of any note ever happens. They got to be a part of something that we would all rather have nothing to do with. It's kind of like how people used to go to public beheadings. . . .

@JenMac That's a pretty interesting comparison. You might be on to something there, the spectacle that attracts people's worst curiosity...

I think anyone who says the bomb scare was "so cool" is kind of pervy. Wouldn't most people have some kind of common decency to think of people getting hurt and feel sympathy, or am I just asking too much from the average folk, here?

@Uraniunfish I do think most people would react in that way only a few morons would think a bomb scare is cool!

@uraniumfish: I think asking humanity out of most human beings is asking too much. Again, people used to go to public beheadings and cheer as innocent people that they had never met were being disemboweled.

It's really stunning how easy it is for human beings to "dehumanize" others. One of the things I find most striking is the furor about "humanizing" Hitler anytime a film or movie about him comes out - and how we can't "humanize" that monster. Personally, I think that if we don't accept the fact that Hitler WAS a human being, and that horrible things can come out of "humans," we run the risk of not learning our lesson from the horrors of the Holocaust - that we as humans are capable of terrible things, and must guard against that side of ourselves as a society - not dismiss one terrible human being as a "monster" because "we" could never do anything like that. "We" did. Sorry rant!

Anyone who thinks a bomb scare is cool has obviously never had anything bad happen to them in their entire lives. Anyone who would say something like that has little to no understanding of live vs. death.

Well, I guess we know that if someone is going to bomb the city, the target is likely to be Times Square?

It may be crude to say that a bomb scare is "cool," but I am not surprised that the thought of their own possible demise would excite people. It's base, but isn't it human? People are certainly fascinated by death - though they may be too dumb to realize it - as JenMac points out.