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Pique n' your interest

Borrowed time

During my first year of university, three friends and I drove 42 hours from Halifax, Nova Scotia to New Orleans during reading week to party our asses off during Mardi Gras. This was in February, 1993.

Without going into all the ugly details, mission accomplished.

The trip home wasn’t pretty. All of us were dirty, hung over, and malnourished after spending a week subsisting on booze, Popeye Chicken, Po’Boy sandwiches and more booze. We were also flat broke.

We stopped briefly in Washington on the way down and visited the war memorials, Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. We meant to visit New York on the way back, but looking and feeling the way we did, we decided to give it a miss.

I remember passing through The Bronx and crawling down the pot-holed I-92, Manhattan plainly visible on the skyline. The twin World Trade Center towers were easy to spot, towering over the other towers.

One minute it was a postcard; the next, it was front page news. Thick gray smoke was rising from the complex of buildings that surround the towers, and we knew something was wrong.

We turned on the radio to find out what, but it was 10 minutes before the announcer had the facts. A bomb had just exploded in the World Trade Center.

Six people died and over 1,000 more were injured while we sat in traffic, although we didn’t find out the extent of the carnage until we were safely back in Halifax.

I had a close friend in New York at the time, who was visiting friends on her reading week. I worried about her the whole way home, and held my breath until she turned up the following day. It turned out she was in Central Park when it happened, and heard the explosion.

We talked about the incident, and I remember saying something about the U.S. being lucky.

Apparently the van that was carrying the explosives was parked near a structural support. The idea was to topple one tower into the other, destroying both buildings and killing everybody. Mercifully, Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist who masterminded the bombing miscalculated how much explosive was needed or to what extent the structure of the mini-van would contain and redirect the explosions.

When the U.S. government finally caught Yousef in the Philippines two years later, they discovered other plans to use chemical weapons against the U.S. by spraying them in airplanes and releasing them into water supplies.

That’s why, as shocked as I was to watch the twin towers collapse on Sept. 11, I couldn’t help thinking that the only reason that the twin towers were still standing in the first place was because Yousef made a mistake eight years ago.

Borrowed time – that’s what the towers and the people inside them were living on. Somebody gave the towers a death sentence a decade ago and it was finally carried out. We underestimated the enemy and their determination to wage war on Americans and American values – killing themselves in the process, if that’s what it takes.

While no one can predict what the long-term effects of Sept. 11 will have on the economy, at least one sector is showing signs of growth – in the wake of devastation the value of human life has just gone up.

Nobody cares what was the top grossing movie at the box office or who was number one on the Billboard charts. Nobody really cares who’s leading the pennant race, or what the contestants had to eat on Fear Factor.

In their own cruel way, the terrorists have shown us what’s truly important:

Life.

Family.

Friends.

Freedom.

We care about the policemen and firemen who died in the line of duty, saving perhaps thousands of lives by imposing some kind of order on the evacuation of the towers. We care about the people in those towers and the hostages in those planes.

When anyone close to us dies before their time, we inevitably become aware of our own vulnerability and mortality. We appreciate our lives, and the lives of those around us, friends and family, all that much more. We question our priorities and put our own niggling problems into perspective.

Typically as time goes by, our pain dulls and disappears. That awareness slips away with it. Life goes on, work takes over, and we become wrapped up in our own problems once again until the next tragedy jars us out of our collective stupor.

I truly hope that doesn’t happen this time.

On Tuesday morning, it became clear that we are in a fight for our survival, for our way of life. Armies are going to war to protect what’s important. because we know we can never have peace without. It’s drastic, it’s tragic, but it’s necessary. We’re realizing, as those people on the plane that crashed outside of Pittsburgh realized, that we have to fight terror head-on if we want to live.

It’s not, as some columnists would have us believe, an American tragedy. Canadians died on those planes and in those buildings, as did the sons and daughters of 40 other countries – it was the World Trade Center after all.

We were part of Operation Desert Storm, and the trade sanctions against Iraq and Afghanistan that helped to rouse this hatred of the West.

America is forever our ally in war and peace, and as our largest trading partner is the source of our prosperity – ask any Whistler businesses that are having a hard time, and they will tell you that Americans are our lifeblood.

And you can bet that they would be behind us if terrorists started to attack Canada. We’re in this thing together, because it’s our duty and because Sept. 11 was an outrage that goes against everything Canada stands for.

The reality is that until we can put an end to world terrorism, we may all be living on borrowed time.

— Andrew Mitchell