What is a wife?
A sigh in the night
A smile across a roomful of strangers
A tug on the old sleeve in the middle of a sad movie
This is a wife.
Her smile can lighten a heavy heart
She could hold a hand
Or lend an ear
Or she could blow a kiss and ease a care
This is a wife.
-But apart from the sheer terror of watching 5,000 lives being snuffed out in a rain of fire, rubble, and smoke, and the audacity of the attack itself, the question that comes to mind is why the [WTC 1, 2, &7]?
-Sure, it was an easy target for a hijacked airplane to hit and, as the terrorists timing shows, it was a good way to kill the maximum number of Americans in an instant.
-Still, the question persists: why New York? The destruction of a portion of the Pentagon on the same morning sent a message, as almost any other target in Washington, DC would have, that war had been declared on the United States government, which is the people after all.
-Why single out anonymous citizens just going about the business of making a living? The answer, as with every other question about the motives of terrorists, can be summed up in a single word: symbolism.
-The force behind America's cultural dominance is the inexorable expansion of democratic capitalism, and that force emanates out from the towers squeezed into lower Manhattan. They have become symbols of all the things the city and the nation is accomplishing.
-Any downtown building projects the image --- indeed, the [NYSE] would have made a more effective target as metaphor for capitalism --- but the Trade Center also had the distinction of representing international capitalism. That made all the difference.
-No one knows exactly for certain who was behind this attack --- although all agree that Osama bin Laden and his network are the likely culprits --- but in the end the question of why anyone might do such a thing becomes more important.
-These people looked at the tip of Manhattan and saw a symbolic villain that, to their perverted way of thinking, was slowly killing their own values and way of life.
-A natural way to ease those feelings is to plot the death of the enemy. Although Americans don't perceive themselves as anyone's enemy, to such fanatics they are evil personified.
-And that perception applies especially to the capitalists working in the WTC [1, 2, &7]. In their opinion, even the lowliest clerk is considered a conspirator in the broad plot to subjugate Third World societies."
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@bennyjohnson 14th amendment and I quote:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside".