This is long. It's also on a sensitive subject. If you're not interested in
this line of discussion, feel free to just ignore this thread.

I started out thinking, sometime around Thursday or Friday: How would
President Luthor react to the WTC destruction? But then I thought - the DCU
is dealing with an interstellar war. Buildings in the DCU are routinely
destroyed. A major American city was wiped off the face of the Earth (Coast
City, during Reign of the Supermen), killing several million people in one
attack. The Capitol building was destroyed during a Deathstroke the
Terminator storyline. Going global, Cheshire and Vandal Savage recently
nuked Qurac (a fictional middle-eastern nation, during an earlier Deathstroke
story) and Montevideo (the real capital of Uruguay, during DC 1 Million), and
Australia had most of their cities razed to the ground a few years ago in the
Invasion! series.

For the real world, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
murdering thousands of people, have stunned the world and irrevocably changed
America. We've lost our sense of security. Our economy has been massively
disrupted. Many are screaming for vengeance, others are lashing out at
anyone who even looks middle eastern, our President has declared a long,
drawn-out war on terrorism that could easily last years or even span decades,
Congress is debating what freedoms should be taken away to make it easier to
catch terrorists (the Senate has already decided to allow email
surveillance without a warrant) - we're talking major changes in the social,
economic, and political landscape of the country.

Ordinarily, art and entertainment adjust easily to society. Anything that
takes place in a different time period or completely alternate universe has
no problem, of course, but the vast majority of material that is supposed to
take place in the "real world" or a mirror of it - everything from sitcoms to
the X-Files - has two choices: ignore the change and risk becoming
irrelevant, or adjust to it. Now I'm not saying every show or comic book
should have a character who knew someone who was there. But comics tend to
be based in something that is near enough the "real world" in which people
have the same attitudes as they do in reality, despite the alien invasions
and super villains.

In order for the political and social climate of the DC Universe to match our
own, its population will need to react to the events of September 11 in the
same way that we have in the real world. But think about it: there are two
reasons why we're so devastated by this attack. 1. We thought we were
invulnerable to outside attacks of this kind. When the cold war ended we
stopped worrying about nuclear armageddon. We haven't had such a massive
attack on our soil in almost 60 years, and even that (Pearl Harbor) was a
military target and during wartime (not to mention around half the number of
casualties). If I remember correctly, we haven't been invaded since the War
of 1812! (Unless you count the Civil War, but we were invading ourselves
then.) This kind of attack is not only unprecedented against us, but for the
vast majority of our population, it came out of nowhere. 2. The sheer scale
still boggles the mind. Four passenger airplanes hijacked within an hour of
each other and turned into weapons, destroying two of the tallest buildings
in the world (weren't the towers something like #5 and #6?), killing several
thousand people and throwing our largest city into chaos.

Stack either of those against just the destruction of Coast City, and try to
explain why that didn't change our nation's outlook, but this did. It's
going to be tough, unless they go the route they did with the election -
ignore what happened in the real world, maybe explain that the WTC was a
casualty of OWAW, and keep things as they are.

Maybe this line of thought is trivial. It probably is. Many people aren't
here to think about it, and many people are grieving for someone they have
lost. For the rest of us, it's far more important to help out with rescue
efforts by donating effort, money, or blood. It's definitely more important
to worry about how we'll respond, and how that response can avoid harming
innocent bystanders (or, more likely, hit as few bystanders as possible) and
deter future terrorists instead of creating permanent enemies. It's also
more important to decide which freedoms we're willing to sacrifice to prevent
terrorism, and which we refuse to give up (hint: write your congresspeople,
ASAP!)

But amidst all the sadness, all the anger, all the frustration, we still have
to go about our business from day to day. We still have to do the laundry,
buy the groceries, go to work or to school. We still want to spend time with
family and friends, and as we start to recover from the shock, we'll still
want to watch TV, go to the movies, and read comics. Many parts of our
lives will be altered, but they should not be destroyed... and I don't think
it's too early to start thinking about how this tragedy is going to alter
them.


--
Kelson Vibber
kelson@...
http://www.hyperborea.org/
Creative Writing - Photography - The Flash