I wonder if the fear will ever go away? I live in Halfax, NS (far and away from NYC) and yet I was still on the phone calling a friend and saying things like...."maybe it was terrorism" and "lets hope for the best". I wonder if we can ever live in a world (ever again) like the one we had pre 911. Have the terrorists in fact won? Isn't fear what they wanted to instill? Am I letting them win by being afraid every something like that happens?

Perfectly normal; it's okay to duck, tho.

hum,
is that the same Halfax, as in the great Halifax Explosion that occurred in 1917?

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

Yes and we are a prime target (seriuosly).

my bold
Sure; certainly by the time the generation that lived through 9/11 dies away. And no, I'm not making a joke, but I think people use "never" and "forever" too lightly. As I understand it, the sinking of the Titanic was a traumatic event to those living at that time. I suspect that people were afraid to sail on ships for a while after. That doesn't seem to be a common fear now.

I also think that over time, even we will fear such things less. As they say, time heals all wounds.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Just goes to show you how paranoid the majority of the herd is. On September 11th, when the report of the first plane hitting the WTC was sent out, the instant impulse was to think it was a tragic accident. It wasn't until the second plane hit that the awareness that it was an attack hit.

That second impact is the turning point, when our instinctive response to a tragedy shifted from thinking of it as an accident first, deliberate act second to vice versa. This generation was severely traumatized by that incident, its going to be at least a generation until its worked out of our system.

have people forgotten the cold war and the continual threat of the end of life on the whole planet?

I haven't, but then there weren't many accidents in the late 70s or 80s that resembled mushroom clouds, so it never occurred to me to think we might have been done for.

Not a threat of the end of life on the whole planet, just horrible beyond anybody's ability to comprehend. And, no, I haven't forgotten it. I remember one time I was taking a nap and woke up to a flash and crash from a nearby lightning strike. I'd been having a nightmare about successively nearer nuclear strikes. Ouch!

It was an amazing feeling when the cold war was over.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Compared to where we are now, I miss it. I liked having sane enemies.

Eh? A prime target for what, exactly? Any strategic military value Halifax has held (deep water winter harbor) ended once people stopped thinking in terms of WWI strategy. (Roughly after Korea.)

No. Halifax at large hasn't succumed to fear. If we had (and I still count myself as a Haligonian), we wouldn't have welcomed and cared for the diverted planes on Sept 11th, without hesitation. (Along with many other Canadian airport communities. Gander, NF in particular.)

Our last generations (two previous to mine, three generations back from yours if I understood your age right) have been there and done that, Banquo, and learned the hard way that life really does go on. (And as always, many thanks to our Bostonian friends for all the help when we needed it, may you never have to buy your own drinks when you're in town.) I'm proud to note that most Haligonians have indeed learned that lesson and remain a hardy bunch.

You should talk to your elders, sometime, Banquo. Let some of our hard-learned pragmatism rub off.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." - FDR.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Yes and no. Fourty-somethings like me and older remember it very well. I had a similar incident to Van Rijn when I was a teenager, I happened to be looking out a window at night, looking towards where the Exxon oil refinery is in New Jersey, when a tank blew up. My immediate thought was it was a nuclear bomb. I still remember duck-and-cover. Nuclear war was a great bogey-man fear of mine growing up.

But I suspect that today's 20-somethings and teens, not to mention even younger, hardly remember the Cold War and think of it as ancient history. I suspect terrorism will be their fear.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

There must have been an abrupt end. As a fourty-something I never heard the duck and cover as a kid, and never knew what these signs on our school were for (ours didn't have the words on them)
Or; maybe regional suppression?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Might be. I'm 48 in December and started first grade in 1964. I remember those signs very well from around New York City, but they were considered close to a joke. I remember the apartment building from when I was a kid had a fallout shelter area in the basement. At one point I think there were supposed to be supplies kept there, but they were long gone. I think everyone pretty much thought that in a nuclear exchange, NYC would be a prime target and we would all die.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

Duck and Cover @ Google Video.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Am I letting them win by being afraid every something like that happens?

Not to be harsh about it, but you are. Take a deep breath and relax. You're a lot more likely to get killed in an auto accident.

If nothing else, take advantage of the fact that Halifax is not much of a terrorist target. There's little symbolic value, for one thing, and "Canada" isn't the first word that probably pops into the fundaloony's heads when they're thinking of which country is their biggest enemy.

Concerned? Yes. Afraid? No.

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

Also played fairly often on the History Channel. Every time I see that it amazes me how much the public didn't know back then.

Even a newspaper can help save you from a nuclear blast.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I think you had to be in school in the 50's to remember the full effect of the a-bomb stuff. Back in '55-'56 we were duckin' and coverin', and I remember being driven down Lake Shore Drive in Cleveland and seeing the Nike missiles up on their launchers across from the aquarium. Nike Ajaxes, if I recall properly. I still have my Civil Defense manuals kicking around somewhere.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I'm 29--30 in two months--and I had an air raid drill when I was in junior high. Everyone involved felt very silly, and none of us could figure out why it was happening. Even unto high school, there were air raid shelter signs all over the buildings. My strongest childhood fear was nuclear war.

Why the difference? Probably where I grew up. I was so close to JPL that they judged our junior high science fair. Also, my parents watched the news. My mom watched the news a lot. Hours a day. I figure I'm about the youngest person out there with such an intense dose of Cold War Terror.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What fear?

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