"Talk of the Town"

John Updike’s writing was about what people surrounding the towers felt saw and how they felt. He said, “…the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception.” I take that as what happened to the World Trade Center seemed so fake and unreal, like how could something like this happen? All of his descriptions reminded me of that day, and I can clearly remember coming home from school that day and watching what had happened on the television; the images are still very clear in my head. I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be there, so close, and watch the towers fall to the ground. The one thing that bothered me in this writing was that a suspect said the United States was too lax and how he could go anywhere he wanted and couldn’t be stopped. When you think about it, that’s exactly what America is about. It’s the part about us that we are so proud of; we like having that freedom.

Susan Sontag stated “if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation,…than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” In this sense, Susan was calling Americans the cowards for the way they kill in war. In my opinion, the bombers were the real cowards. They think that killing many innocent people and themselves is the right thing to do for their country, while we Americans kill for purposes that are necessary. There are so many opinions on whether it was okay for the bombing, and that is because different cultures have different opinions on how to react to situations. We need to understand why there is conflict to understand why these things happen.