oh, please
May 21, 2002 08:45 AM

As I listened to NPR and watched CNN (my daily dose of politically oppositional news), something occurred to me.

Specifically, something about the way we've been intently watching to see if maybe, just maybe, the US government could have been aware that terrorists were about to fly planes into buildings.

What occurred to me is this: Does it really matter? Honestly, if the government had known and had taken steps to prevent it, would we have believed it?

Seriously. If someone had told you, before you saw the World Trade Center collapse, that your flight was cancelled, that you'd have to wait longer at the airport, that commercial flights might be shot down in the sky, that more of your tax dollars were being spent to secure airports or something equally ludicrous-seeming: would you have believed it? I doubt it. If those events had been somehow prevented, we would assume the government (which we always want to think of as something foreign, apart from ourselves) had wasted our time and money on empty threats.

And as the government is, in fact, composed of people. People not unlike you. If the information was there, wouldn't it still have been impossible for them to believe? I'm not talking about the people whose job it is to piece together puzzles and imagine the unimaginable, but people who drive policy. Who have the power to effect change. Those people think like you and I. That's what we pay them to do.

My point isn't a brilliant insight. It's just that, on a certain level, I suspect we're seeking to know why the people we elect didn't try to pursue some course of action that we wouldn't have let them pursue anyhow. That what we want to hear is that we knew but couldn't believe.

And what I think we should be doing is understanding why we couldn't believe in the first place. Why we ask, with such innocent confusion, what they hate us for.