On one corner, Lance Orten sells T-shirts at his stall: across the street is fellow Vietnam vet Duane Jackson, a handbag and scarf vendor. Rallis Gialaboukis has his hot dog cart next to Jackson. And then there is Bullet, the homeless guy who darts from stall to stall, chatting everyone up. Their collective alarms went off when smoke started coming out of a Pathfinder, left with its engine running in front of a phone booth, already conspicuous because it was illegally parked in a bus lane....Time Magazine.
Cops were called, Times Square was evacuated. The people of New York dodged yet another bullet. Had the bomb gone off, it would have been devastating to people, property and anything else in is way. No way to sugar coated it, the intent was to do as much damage as possible to as many as possible.
It took less than 54 hours to identify and catch the offender. It was close, the airplane that he was on, was at the gate, headed for Dubai. At the last minute FBI stormed the plane and the suspect was taken into custody.
Looks like we were right on top of things.
Homeland Security is well and alive in America.
Nice Story, Good Job!
Let's go back to Lance, Duane, Rallis and Bullet. Had they not seen and acted, it would have been a whole different outcome. These four men seemingly had no special training to notice what they did. They could have just stuck with selling their handbags or making more hotdogs, minding their own business. Are they always so vigilant about what is going on around them, noticing when Something seems out of place? Did they talk to each other to see if the others had seen what they had seen individually?
Tells me you don't have to be a brain surgeon to be aware. No special training except to be a student of Life. We are each in situations everyday that no one else but us, see. Not always of an extremist nature, are we aware of what is going on around us? Not talking about living in a state of fear, far from it. The question is what is going on around us and how do we help.
We live in an age of so much unknown but instinctively, have the capacity to see much more than we realize. Whether the danger of the immediate, a overwhelming sorrow or the joy of a child, are we not only in the Moment but in the Moment that is all around us? Thanks Lance, Duane, Rallis and Bullet for the heads up and the life lesson. Wishing it might always be this way...
