Beth Ware voted for George Bush in 2000. A few months later, one of the four hijacked 9/11 airplanes crashed in Shanksville, her home town. The residents' lives changed immediately.
"Before 9/11 I'm not sure I'd even heard of Iraq and Afghanistan," says another local. "Now I watch the news every night. I think about the rest of the world and terrorists all the time, and frankly I'm scared."
Despite the recent capture of Saddam Hussein, Beth is uncomfortable with the war in Iraq. She is not sure how she will cast her ballot next year.
"I appreciate the effort but I think it's sad our guys are dying there," said Ms. Ware, a high school teacher whose husband, a paramedic, rushed to the crash site. "Now that we have Saddam, well, I don't think it's bad. But I'm worried that the way America has behaved, we'll always be seen as the oppressor."
"We all have the same concerns about what happened here, and there's relief about Saddam Hussein, but I'm still not sure that entering this war was a good thing," said Paulette Denner, a fifth-grade teacher, emerging from the gray brick public school. "I don't think anyone can really keep us safe. And since we didn't have international support, I worry that we are no longer respected or considered trustworthy and that could be very damaging."
With the USA once again on high level terror alert, there is a real danger for Bush that another serious Al Quaeda attack prior to the election would seriously highlight the ineffectiveness of the invasion of Iraq.
(full NY Times story here).
