Just a thought: if you were a mugger or a rapist, would you choose your victims at a place that posted No Guns Allowed on the Premises signs (like the Mall of America or Block E),  or would you look for victims outside of a shooting range? How about not a shooting range, but anyplace where your would be victim, or anyone within earshot for that matter, may be armed?  How stupid a criminal would you be?  How stupid a shopper are you?

Would you feel safer or more vulnerable if airlines handed out tasers to every passenger as they boarded?

Zack and I just got back from watching United 93.

Really good movie.  Very, very tense and emotional.  I was impressed by how the movie lets the events that happened speak for themselves.  The passengers and crew on the flight were not over romanticized.  We never know their names.  That's unecessary; it doesn't matter who they are, it only matters what they did.  They were all of us.  The only characters in the movie that we see before they reach the airport are the terrorists, whom we see praying and preparing early in the morning.  There is no attempt whatsoever to understand them or paint them as heroes or victims.  They did what they did and they had their reasons, none of which are pertinent to this movie.

I was a little worried about watching this.   It's still a bit close to the events for me to watch footage and revisit that day, but I'm very glad that this movie was made and I really wanted to see it.  It was really scary and my heart was pounding all the way through it.  These are historic events that we need to remember.  Moviemakers are the story tellers of the 21st century and if only fictions like Syriana are told, then the truth gets lots or forgotten.  I'm not saying I think United 93 is the truth.  It's a movie and no movie is true, but then no history book is true, either.  The best you can ever hope for in conveying an historic event is to be as accurate as possible.  I believe that this one is accurate. 

As Zack said when we got home, " that won't happen again not because of any airport security but because of the passengers.  We won't let it happen."

I remember being glued to the tv set on that morning, and hearing about the flight that went down in a field.  I knew immediately how that must have happened.  I knew that the passengers had fought back.  The movie does a great job of showing that they were not bigger than life heroes.  They wanted to live.  They knew their chances were slim, but they also knew that if they did nothing, they had no chance at all.

So they opted for Butch and Sundance.

You know what I mean.
 
I think that's a very American thing.  There is something in the type of people who come to this country that refuses to roll over and play dead.  It is something that is hereditary.  There is a part of our establishment that wants to ritilin or politically correct that orneriness out of us, but they'd better not succeed because that's the very thing that makes us who we are.  Maybe we got to the moon because we're too stupid to know how impossible that was.  Maybe we won two world wars because we're too reckless to think about the costs. Maybe we're stupid and reckless but when the chips are down, an American goes down swinging, not looking.

An American runs out, guns blazing, even if the entire Bolivian Army is out there.

Butch and Sundance got shot to doll rags but we tell the story and love the movie even though those two were just a pair of petty crooks.  

The passengers of United flight 93 may have counted amoung them petty crooks, philanderers and tax cheats, but they won the first battle in the war on terrorism without any warning or training.  They did something for themselves and all of us that far outweighs whatever bad or evil they did before they boarded that plane. They deserve that their story be told, and told well.

They deserve this movie.

 

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