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Voices in the Wilderness: Finding Information OnlineSep 13 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line It is to the news organizations and to ad hoc databases created by a united American public that we must look for who is found and who is feared lost
In the aftermath of the day of contemptible mass murder* that now displaces the Battle of Sharpsburg as the bloodiest day on American soil, people continue to be unable to account for those they care about. The site has posed the question, What online resources are available where people can find information about loved ones who may have been directly affected by the September 11th terrorist incidents? I am sorry to say the answer is asymptotically close to, None. The primary reason so many are searching desperately for online resources is of course the degradation of communications infrastructure in Manhattan and within the Beltway. I say the infrastructure and its consequent capacity has been degraded, not destroyed, for good reason: communications capability remains in place, but is not as extensive or as capable of carrying traffic as before. It should be obvious that a degraded commo net cannot sustain the increased usage that arises from the very act of viciousness that degraded it. But this is not merely a hindrance to getting information by phone, fax, or email; it is, if you will reflect a moment, a hindrance to anyone's getting any raw information to be disseminated anywhere, in any way - including on the Net. Yet most of us spend our days working, working even through these crises and through these abominable acts, whether at home or in offices or on the back forty, and our primary news resource is the same as our primary work-time information resource: the Net. With phone commo uncertain at best, we are relying on news organizations and various agencies, and we don't all have access to a television from 9 to 5 (we do here at my office, but I know not everyone does). The result has been that the 'first-thought' resources, the Net equivalents of ABC, CNN, and the like, have been nearly as overwhelmed as the phone system into and out of New York and the District. There are alternatives. There are plenty of 'open' and obvious resources. For example, I already knew, just as everyone in the country did, that Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General of the United States, had been slain by these vicious people. (She has family here, Toni and [the Honorable] Bob Lawrence, whom I know.) Now, most major news organizations have partial lists of passengers on the planes that were hijacked. The airlines affected have similar information online. All of course are being overwhelmed by desperate requests for information. Less obvious or well-known resources are such sites as the World Trade Center Survivors database being built and maintained at http://www.ny.com/wtclist.html. Such sources are unedited and ad hoc, but useful. Similar unexpected resources, equally ad hoc and unedited, and equally useful, are, for example, such coalitions of friends as your church may provide, or clubs and civic organizations, or - notably - your alumni network. In my case, Washington and Lee alumni in DC and NYC are checking in by email to the University's webpage (at http://alumni.wlu.edu/cost.htm), and passing on what information they know or do not know about their brethren (and for classes after mine, sisters). Once again, I find that people I know - though no actual classmates as yet: the last classmate I lost in this fashion was CPT David M. Herr '84, USMC, during Desert Shield (before Storm) - people I know are among the missing, such as Rob Schlegel '85 at DoD. It may as well be faced now, by the way, that as the hours lengthen, despite grateful miracles at the World Trade Center, 'missing' will increasingly mean 'missing, presumed dead.' The circumstances of their murder (we need to be frank here) are such that in some cases, certainty in recovering the victims's mortal remains will be dubious at best. I would strongly urge anyone who has likely lost a family member to consult probate counsel fairly soon. I have said this is the aftermath of the day that has surpassed Sharpsburg / Antietam as the bloodiest day in American history. It is also the aftermath of the greatest intelligence failure in American history (let us all pause to execrate the memories of Frank Church and that careerist weasel Bill Colby). I have also noted that most of the Net resources that have any information on these mass murders, from casualty lists to breaking news, are journalistic, and that most are even now (though less so than on Tuesday) slow, overwhelmed, or inaccessible. For news and analysis that may be of some service to those in cruel suspense over the fate of loved ones, and of service also to all of us who are affected by the (temporary, tactical) success of the moral vermin who assaulted this nation, allow me to suggest www.bbc.co.uk, www.sky.com, and the public version of what is, so far, a better intel provider than we apparently had at Langley, www.stratfor.com. Let me close by making one further point. It is the ad hoc, barn-raisin' and quiltin' bee, informal networks: of business comrades or alumni or co-religionists or who have you: who, in a harking-back to our rural past, are providing by far the most useful knowledge on the Net of who is safe and who is missing. Trip got out, and he's called Trey, and Leighton emailed Cholly, but no one's heard from Skip, though we know he was at such and such a place.... In the wake of so vast a crime - for crime it was and remains, and no apologetics or 'understanding' mean a damn thing - it is in some way a matter of pathos that the world's sole superpower is reduced to using alumni association emails and parish newsletters and basic 'bush telegraph' to count its casualties. It is also profoundly reassuring: the elasticity and informality, the reawakened American spirit of make-do and can-do and buckskin self-reliance and fixing things with chewing gum and baling wire, are among the most powerful forces in human history. And those who have wantonly and stupidly awakened those American traditions will be brought not merely to their knees but to their graves by those very American virtues. So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. _____________________________________ * I remain astounded by the rhetorical restraint of Americans from DC and Manhattan to Dime Box and Muleshoe. Obviously, it would be wrong to use racial or religious epithets in referring to the drooling barbarians responsible for the attacks - whoever they may turn out to be: it is their personal and individual loathsomeness that is at issue, not their background. Yet in comparison to a Cordell Hull style designation as 'no-good, lyin' p-ssants,' or the Churchillian rhetoric Winston would have deployed: 'bestial, drilled brutes, slavishly obedient to a guttersnipe': it strikes me as odd that we do not so much as call them the despicable swine they were, or use plain language about barbarous murder.  |
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