WorldNetDaily: NYC 'threat' was a hoax?

Apparently the original informant was pulling our chain all along--or so the FBI now says.

Yet if this was a hoax, it brought some curious results--specifically, the capture of a number of terrorist "enemy combatants."

To those who suggest that the City of New York overreacted to the threat, I say: You just had a decent drill, and maybe you've learned something. Why not take it in that spirit?

Oh, but you want peace again. Well, let me repeat Robert A. Heinlein's definition of the word peace:

"Peace" is a condition in which no civilian every pays attention to military casualties that do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence, unless said civilian is a relative of one of the casualties. But if there has ever been a time in history when "peace" meant that there was no fighting going on, I have not been able to find it.

That last is from Heinlein's early novel, Starship Troopers, and is the POV of a soldier.

In fact, we now know that for only two hundred eighteen years of recorded human history has "peace" in the sense of no fighting going on ever obtained--and those 218 years were never consecutive. We're not going to have a continuous period of peace until Jesus sets up His Millennial Kingdom--and that will come only after we really fight a "war to end all wars."

So we're not going to have "peace." Get over it. And quit talking about over-reaction. You cannot over-react to a thing like this. Frankly, we'll have to re-think all of our commuting and travel plans, and maybe major retailers will have to offer delivery to compete with the on-line retailers, so that people won't have to carry packages in the subway. Why, just two days ago, I returned home, not on the subway, but on New Jersey Transit's Morris and Essex Line--and a fellow passenger asked me to watch his bags while he went back into the station to buy a bottle of water. Not that he was afraid of a fellow passenger stealing his stuff--but because "I don't want anybody freaking out because of unattended bags." In short, he wanted me to vouch for his bags to the conductor if need be--something I was glad to do.

Maybe part of the problem is that our society--and society means "fellowship" after all--has lost some of the "fellow-feeling" that makes a society run well. We'll have to rediscover that, and watch out for one another in subtle ways.

Now if we can learn that sort of valuable lesson from the NYC subway experience, then we need not really care whether this incident was a hoax, or a deliberate drill.