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Earlier this week, our Air Force conducted a low level overflight of New York City by an Air Force VC-25, the military variant of the Boeing 747-200B that becomes Air Force One when the President is on board. Escorted by two F-16 fighters, the flight was a “mission” to obtain photographs of the jumbo jet against the metropolitan panorama.
Unfortunately, the flight was not announced. Both windows and New Yorkers were rattled, according to the New York Times, causing
…momentary panic in some quarters [that] led to the evacuation of several buildings in Lower Manhattan and Jersey City. By the afternoon, the situation had turned into a political fuse box, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg saying that he was “furious” that he had not been told in advance about the flyover. White House Apologizes for Air Force Flyover.
Writing on www.dorfonlaw.org, Neil Buchanan, usually a source of sober analysis, described the event as “…a jumbo jet flying at a very low altitude, apparently being pursued by a jet fighter,” demanded that those responsible be given leave to seek new employment: The Flyover Debacle: Head(s) Must Roll.
Give us a break.
Sure, the unnecessary secrecy added to the drama, and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood ought to have a few words with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but there’s no reason for heads to roll. It was neither a firing offense nor that big a deal.
The real problem is that some New Yorkers are wimps who demand special treatment. Almost eight years have elapsed since four airliners were hijacked by Islamic zealots, who crashed two into the trade towers, one into the Pentagon, and the fourth (Flight 93) into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers thwarted the hijackers’ effort to fly the jet into the White House.
The Pentagon was repaired within a year. But in an enduring embarrassment to the nation, New Yorkers dithered and dwaddled for years before deciding what to do with the 15 acres on which the trade towers once stood, all the while acting as though they were the only survivors of an attempt to end the world and thus were entitled to special privileges and eternal deference to their fragile psyches.
Enough. It’s time for New Yorkers to break out of their bubble of self-pity and victimhood and to put 9/11 into perspective.
If casualties are prorated for the differences in population between 1941 and 2001, a higher percentage of Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor than on 9/11. The physical damage on 9/11 was an insignificant portion of national assets. And our ability to defend ourselves was not diminished.
In fact, air travel became safer on the afternoon of 11 September 2001 than on that morning. Not only were there 19 fewer hijackers to worry about, passengers and air crews had learned to fight back: the probability of hijackers succeeding in seizing a jetliner and flying it into a skyscraper is much, much lower than it was before Flight 93, probably on the order of Rush Limbaugh’s renouncing his right wing ideology and embracing Scandinavian socialism. There’s no objective reason to tremble at the sight of a U.S. Air Force VC-25 buzzing Manhattan — even if the flight is a surprise.
Our main injury on 9/11 was a blow to our false sense of invulnerability, and to our self-confidence — which was exactly what Bin Laden intended. He knew he didn’t have the resources to destroy the United States, so he didn’t try. Instead, he aimed to shake our self-confidence, to provoke us into living in fear, for he knew that a nation so traumatized would curtail its own liberties and destroy the freedoms for which he has such contempt.
A good many Americans didn’t let him down. George Bush and Dick Cheney exploited fear for political gain. And New Yorkers, who have long assumed their city is the center of the universe, have raised pious victimhood to a level as ridiculous as it is pathetic.
New Yorkers who were converted into blobs of quivering jello by the VC-25 overflights don’t need to see heads roll. They need to buy a bottle of spine starch and see a shrink.