The Impossible

I was checking my favorite news sites this morning when I stumbled across the following headline:

9/11 Could Have Been Prevented, Says Expert.

So called ‘news stories’ like this really piss me off. Let me explain why.

First of all, this isn’t even news. It’s an attention seeking asshole trying to get his name in print by exploiting a national tragedy. Unless the news story is about a terrorist who actually managed to infiltrate the various intelligence agencies and deliberately hid critical information, I don’t care.

Here’s the thing. The CIA, FBI, MI5 etc get hundreds of ‘tips’ every single week. Most of them come to nothing, and it would be physically impossible to act on them all. So you get a vague report that says that someone may try to attack a particular target on or around a particular month.

What do we expect them to do? Completely cordon off an airport for 6 months, interrogate every single person who wants to fly and search everyone?

Basically, this story is saying that if the right person had picked up the right report out of hundreds and took extreme and unprecedented action, disaster could have been averted. If someone had taken one vague report that was no different from the thousands of others received and decided to close down an airport, the towers would still be standing.

Of course, this extra security would have been noticed by the terrorists, who would probably have just pushed back their timetable until the security was loosened.

My point is, every major disaster, whether natural, terrorism related or ‘other’ could have been averted. If the treaty of Versaille had been a little less extreme along with hundreds of other factors, WW2 could have been averted. If an engineer had decided to take a seemingly mint-condition plane out of service on a hunch that the engine had undetectable micro-fractures in it, many plane crashes could have been averted.

I could go on, but you get my point.

Basically, accidents happen, bad people do bad things and good people suffer. People do their best to prevent it, but they’re not infallible.

So why people feel the need to write these ‘new stories’ is totally beyond me. In fact, it isn’t. It’s just another douchebag trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame by being ‘controversial’.

The saddest thing is that since 9/11 hundreds of extra safeguards have been put in place for our safety…and what do we do? We complain. These same people who point fingers at people for not being superhuman are the same people who are complaining about long wait-times at airports, about not being able to take pocket-knives onto planes.

I honestly don’t get it. We’re saying that we should be protected, but when faced with the reality of the protection, we don’t like it. We should be able to just hop onto planes, carrying whatever we choose, while at the same time guaranteeing that terrorists are denied entry.

We want the impossible and bitch about not getting it.