No Bearer Of Burdens Can Bear The Burden Of Another

At King's College London I was tutored in various subjects by a charismatic (too charisamtic for some tastes) New Zealander called Alan Beaven. I liked him and he gave me the first and last high mark I achieved in my ill-starred legal scholarship - there is no false modesty in this, my first degree was a high-water-mark of mediocrity. He will not have remembered me but yesterday he came to my mind. His name rolled up the screeen at the end of United 93 the film about the 9/11 flight retaken from the hijackers by its passengers. Alan was one of those passengers. Take a look at http://www.unitedheroes.com/Alan-Beaven.html While you are there click on some of the links to pages about the other passsengers. Try Mark Bingham the gay rugby player from San Francisco. These were the representatives of the Great Satan who died that day. Try to get a handle on all of this. Try this as a starting point http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=10&paper=540

And here's another little personal memory of that day. It was rekindled when I watched a documentary last night, 9/11 State of Emergency. Don't worry if you missed it because it's bound to be on next year on the 10th anniversary. The chief air traffic controller spoke of the confusion which reigned, of the thousands of planes aloft above America. A crowded radar confusion of dots was shown. Noone knew which flights were at risk. And I remember that one of those dots on 9/11 contained my wife, flying American Airlines into Chicago. Sharon went off our radar until late that night when the wife of another passenger phoned me to say she was safe, diverted to Canada. My caller's husband had been kind enough to take a list of numbers from his fellow travellers and communicated the list to her to make the happy calls. I sat at home with two bewildered young daughters and my terrified father-in-law as we became very temporary participants in world affairs. By Al Qaeda's reckoning we were none of us innocents and were therefore fair game in their holy war. An Americanism is apt - go figure.