Bombing China

Try to imagine two cars driving into shoppers, then 5 or 6 bombs going off in quick succession.  Police and private security at the stores run everywhere.  Local news channels are on the scene in a few minutes;  CNN shows up in the next hour and we start to see live reports, every hour for the next two months.  We get to see families of the 31 who were killed and many more injured.  Relatives parade by to say what nice people they were.

At the Boston Marathon two bombs killed 3 and injured 264.  We got news of it for a year afterwards.  At Boston sporting events, people actually sing the National Anthem.  Nobody forgets, at least for now.

If we had an event like this, every other month or so, there would be Congressional hearings and senior government leaders firing questions and moving people around to get them out of the line of fire.  There would be police everywhere,  television and radio stories about how to survive a random attack, and legislation would set new standards for collecting information about everyone in the country.  It would make 9/11 seem like a short review of counter-terrorism operations.

This is what is happening in XinJiang, China.  The random killing of children and adults with knives was not sufficient to kill enough people to get the leaders to pay attention, so bombs and automobiles have picked up the pace.  What they get from this kind of thing escapes most of us.  Seeing a child cut to pieces is hardly the image terrorists want to show to their audience.  If their was tension with Muslims in that region before, there will only be more after seeing them.  The latest was in a market, a normal looking suburb, with normal looking middle-class people who shop there.  [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-27502652 ]

Terror isn't a good word for this.  It doesn't strike terror unless we have a clear danger, over a period of time.  I remember the feeling when people in our area started being shot in public places by a couple of whakos who were eventually caught.  We were never sure what these idiots were really trying to say to us when they were arrested and went to jail.  All we could think of was "look at me" which is in that 15 minutes of fame that we are all supposed to get.  I sympathize with the Chinese on this one.  My wife was in the corridor of the Pentagon that the airplane hit on 9/11.  I remember that feeling.  It was hate.  It was long-term hate, that meant devoting my life to finding these folks so they could be killed by our government.  I had the feeling that no matter what I did, it was not enough.  They make an enemy every time they do something like this, and I hope they find justice somewhere other than a court.