I’d like to take a moment to thank the New York City T-shirt vendor who saw something wrong and did the right thing:
“…The bomb was left inside a dark green Nissan Pathfinder, left with its engine running and hazard lights flashing near the junction of 45th Street and Broadway.
A T-shirt vendor, who was a Vietnam veteran, alerted police when he noticed smoke coming out of it. Police hurriedly evacuated thousands of tourists and theatre-goers, including women in evening gowns, from the area on Broadway’s busiest night of the week.”
Juxtapose this story with that of the heartless bastards who did nothing as a hero lay dying on the cold concrete, which was warmed temporarily by…his own blood. How easy
would it have been for this vendor to scuttle away and say, “not my problem,”? For every hero, there are a slew of people who, for whatever reason, slink away from the responsibility to do what is right. I’m just glad that on this night it was the Vietnam Vet who happened to be nearby, and not the herds of sheep who ensured the death of Alfredo Tale-Yax.
This story is also interesting for the South Park component, but at the same time I’d like to wait a few days to see how it all unfolds before jumping to conclusions:
The device, which failed to detonate, was left near the offices of Viacom, which owns the irreverent cartoon series.
Last month postings on an Islamic website warned the creators of South Park – Matt Stone and Trey Parker – that they could face violent reprisals after an episode of the show featured Mohammed in a bear suit.
Is it possible that we live in a world where sick and twisted souls would attempt to cause large scale death and destruction because of a cartoon image of Mohammed in a bear suit? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you know that the answer is a resounding YES (although, Osama Bin Laden seems to have been living under a rock for years and he’s precisely the kind of guy who would do such a thing…so even you Neal Gabler Mole Men don’t have an excuse for not knowing the correct answer).
There are a lot of ways this story can twist and turn over the next few days, so I’ll refrain from giving my opinions on Viacom for now. However, I would like to take a moment to ask the President how all that outreach to the Islamic world is paying off. It appears that fanatics are…just as fanatical. And it appears that the clash (or should we go with really bad chafing action?) of civilizations that everyone wants to pretend isn’t happening—is.
