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When I walked into the newsroom on Friday morning, someone was trying to get the satellite television to work.
That's never a good sign.
It's usually sports reporters who rely on the satellite dish for various sports events. And they work nights. The rest of us, when we think of the television at all, seem content to rely on the networks.
But here we were, searching for information about the British police officers who shot and killed a suspicious person in the London subways. It was just a day after an ineffectual subway bombing that could have been another July 7-style disaster had the terrorists been able to get their act together.
Thinking about the satellite dish brought me back to Sept. 11, 2001, a terrible time when I seemed to have spent the entire day glued to the tube — watching the same awful scenes over and over again.
It started out with someone fiddling with the satellite TV connection.
And then the almost benign scene of the World Trade Center towers, with smoke coming out of one of them.
We all thought it was an accident. I was telling everyone who came within a few feet of my desk that I read somewhere that a B-25 bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building on a foggy day not long after the end of World War II.
Then the second plane hit.
One consequence of terrorism is that it coarsens us, makes us feel less likely to consider the possibility that all suspects might not be guilty. After all, among the murders and terrorists at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq there were also innocent people who were simply caught up in a police sweep of a neighborhood. The desire to defend ourselves from terrorism makes us forget about the innocent, and in that sense, we lose a little of our humanity.
The wire services Friday morning were filled with stories about fear and uncertainty — but no deaths and only one injury — in the London subways last week.
Rumors were rampant in London after the second bombing attempt. Police
increased patrols and heightened security. Anyone looking remotely suspicious — wearing a backpack or a heavy coat — was stopped and questioned.
"It scares me," one young woman told a Washington Post foreign service reporter outside a London subway station. "Actually, I'm petrified. But I need to go back to work. And I have no other chance of getting out of here. What can I do?"
With that, she disappeared down the stairs toward the trains.
At 10 a.m. London time Friday, plainclothes police officers shot and killed a man at a south London station. The early reports said the man had fled when police asked him to stop. They yelled at him, "Get down, get down."
But he kept running, half tripping as he went. Police shot him, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
One rumor had it that he was an attempted suicide bomber. Someone said he was wearing a baseball cap and a coat. Others said he was Asian.
But he's dead now. As I write this, I have no idea whether he was a terrorist on the run, or just a scared guy who didn't quite understand what the police wanted him to do.
And, God help me, I feel no alarm or concern about his passing.
(Call Opinion page editor Richard Mial at (608) 791-8232, or contact him by e-mail at rmial@lacrossetribune.com.)
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