Never before— except for maybe Desert Storm and OJ Simpson—have I seen all the New York area network TV stations cancel their money-making programming to bring 24-hour coverage of anything “worldly”.

If it’s one thing the programming world is good for, it’s information dissemination. People up here don’t know where to look for their loved ones— Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey.

For those New Yorkers who’ve lived here all their lives, NY now appears a much bigger place and much like a maze. Thankfully, the media are assisting by interviewing people who are looking for loved ones—great!

But it borders on hypocrisy when the US media cover Kosovo, Sarajevo and all these ethnic battles all over the world and report them with such indifference and downplay their severity.

The WTC/Pentagon attack is no different than a car bomb in Israel killing hundreds every day.

Yet, it is heralded as a world event.

The only thing that I believe makes this a global event is the mystery surrounding the effects on the NY Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and all other markets and securities associated with these. Primarily, this is what the rest of the world is most concerned about—the possible economic crisis. Immediately, the 4,700 plus dead and missing people are forgotten with a single blink.

Economics is without doubt a critical matter at this time, especially given the slowdown of the US economy within recent times. I doubt the US will allow any significant fall to realise. Their global supremacy must be maintained, even if the cost is destroying thousands, possibly millions, of lives in another country across the world. But I am no expert and I steer clear of speculation.

In many boardrooms across the globe, the opening remarks would be, “A tragic event has occurred in NY and the Company has sent its condolences. Next point of business... how do we profit from this?”

Everyone—business and individual alike—is strategising to profit from this tragedy and its aftermath—a clear indication of the far-ranging perversions we all have within us.

And the same “values” President George Bush strives to rebuild are the same values for which the US is hated by many. The US ideology called “freedom” has been perverted by such things as legal prostitution—and then complaining that Aids is on the rise—and by legalising pornography, as long as the women are at least 18 years old. If these are the values he seeks to rebuild and to promote after being given a second chance to get it right, then I suggest he prepares his battleships again a few years from now.

And why is it that “an eye for an eye” seems just to him at this time? The same values that are purported by general laws—common law, if I’m not mistaken—are likely to be violated by the very people who design and promote such legislation. How civilised is that?

I went to Manhattan Wednesday night and saw literally hundreds of posters with pictures of missing people. They’ve even painted a wall—ordinarily considered graffiti—in memory of the dead. People have to look in two states to find their loved ones, or to identify their bodies as the case may be. Some would say I’m a fool for going down there, but I figured rather than thanking God I was not there, go see if anyone who was there needed my help—blood, a volunteer, a hand to hold, or someone to just be there.

Imagine if you were lying broken in the hospital after the towers crashed down, and no one came looking for you?

After hearing Bush speak, I fear the worst is yet to come. Afghans are already fleeing their homes in fear, certainly with the same fear New Yorkers have now: the fear that one day soon, someone is going to end your life without negotiation or mercy.