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NOTICE:
The International Emergency Management Society's Transportation Saftey and Security Workshop Janurary 28-29th 2003
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Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and
Risk Management
Crisis and Emergency Management
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NOTICE: The ICDRM's monthly emergency managment forum, held at the GWU |
| December
2002
Volume 3 - Number 3 |
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Links:
Current events
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Terror in the US
By Ana Lucia Hill
I was asked to write about my own risk perception about terrorism, instead I present what my impressions were a day after September 11. Many things had happen since then, but the complexity of events occurred and still to see (?), do not give me much more hope. A similar version of this article was first published in the Political Supplement of a Mexican Newspaper: Reforma, September 16, 2001. Time seems to pass quite slowly after the terrible events in New York and Washington. Although we are reincorporated to our daily activities, there is still something missing outside. Silence still predominates. Now we only hope that little by little everything will return to normality or to get as closer to normality as we can get. Nevertheless, and although everything indicates that at the moment everything has ended, what happened on Tuesday is for many only the beginning. But beyond the general insecurity and uncertainty, there are other elements that the common American does not emphasize by ignorance or lack of historic referral to situations of economic or political instability. Only a day from the terrorist attacks, the United States awakes to face the fallen of myths, the mythical military invincibility of the Pentagon and the mythical invincibility of the international financial supremacy. Facing the terror lived and still felt, having witnessed the material lost of the Twin Towers and the military aggression at the Pentagon, these myths were undressed and we come to realize how vulnerable they were. The myth of modernity also crumbled in a single blink. That modernity had fallen, it collapsed. Today Americans face a modernity that does not know where it will take them, a modernity complete of wrong questions, questions like which is the nation we need to attack, who to held responsible, and which are the nations involved. All these questions are incorrect. On Tuesday we witnessed when President Bush described the road to follow in order to give answers to what happened. The rationality of President Bush's speech coincides with the same format of the postwar period. Rationality parked half century behind. A format that establishes that a nation could declare War and (to defend itself) counterattack the nations involved. The speech of Bush is stationed on it. Within this logic, the greater problem is to define whom the enemy is, a logic connected and immediately linked to the context of the World War II, a logic that little has to do with the globalized world in which we live today. To what occurs today -a economic- political hegemony in pieces -, everything seems to suggest the origin of the problem is internal. Internal as the glances and faces of desperation of a society that copes with little of reality, terror and the violence that can be experience in a daily basis in the international context. A society that today faces the abrupt emergency of an existing post-modernity slightly recognized prior to this events. A post-modernity that the average American does not understand, the same way he/she does not understand that the modernity of the postwar has been left behind |