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another view
by JonUs
Thursday, Mar. 20, 2003 at 11:29 PM
mmiles55@comcast.net
Another view of the war.......
By Evan Coyne Maloney
Posted: 20 March 2003
A few hours ago, slightly before midnight on a Wednesday, with a
comfortable chill in the air, the streets of SoHo, Greenwich Village and
Union Square were empty. After walking more than two miles, I barely saw
a soul that wasn't driving a taxi in search of a fare.
Not since the days that followed the attacks of September 11th have I
seen so few people during such a long walk through Manhattan.
Was it an anomaly? An off night for some inexplicable reason? Or for an
explicable reason of which I was not aware?
Was it mere coincidence that, not even three hours after the war
started, the streets of Manhattan were empty?
A True Gauge of Public Sentiment
--------------------------------
If you were to conduct a poll of Manhattanites, I'm pretty confident
that a large majority of them would say that war is unnecessary because
Saddam Hussein doesn't pose a threat. But the empty streets contradict
that. And they may be a more accurate reflection of the public's deepest
feelings than any five-minute survey in which statisticians try to turn
a few hundred people without caller ID into spokesmen for an entire
nation.
The fear of attack that kept people off the streets and out of the taxis
is a fear that agents of Saddam Hussein--or sympathetic forces--are
currently in place among us, that they possess weapons with which to
attack us, and that they are capable of attacking tonight, tomorrow or
at any time.
The empty streets show that, despite all the rhetoric, when push comes
to shove, when twelve years of unheeded U.N. resolutions give way to the
much-harder-to-ignore cruise missiles and invading armies, people know
that the threat is real.
Fear = Size of Threat * Likelihood of Attack
--------------------------------------------
Simply by fearing an attack, a person admits that Saddam Hussein and the
forces sympathetic to him present a danger. What doesn't make sense is
how someone can feel that fear and still say that Saddam Hussein poses
no threat.
So, on the first day of this new front in the war on terror, I ask my
fellow Manhattanites to spend some time thinking about why they stayed
in. If we don't have to worry about Saddam Hussein, then where the hell
is everybody?
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