Article
ATMs vital to freedom
In the wake of Sept. 11's deadly terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., ATM Industry Association International Director Mike Lee notes that ATMs give people the ability to control the flow of cash belonging to them, even in the aftermath of a devastating tragedy. It isn't a coincidence, Lee contends, that many countries in Central and Eastern Europe only began installing ATMs after they became democratic countries.
September 11, 2001
Survivors trapped in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center have called out on their cell phones to be rescued. People trapped in the inferno of the WTC before it collapsed and passengers on the hijacked jetliners used their phones, poignantly, to say goodbye to their loved ones.
America and the civilized world are in grief. Some say the world will never be the same again. Perhaps the nature of freedom has changed and, with it, the future shape of peace in the world.
Distraught and devastated New Yorkers queued at ATMs to draw money in a city trying to survive the biggest act of terrorism ever inflicted on United States soil. A fear drove them to the cash machines, a fear that there would be shortages - shortages of fuel, shortages of cash, along with the terrible shortage of blood.
The world is trying to recover. People are trying to regain their composure, to reassert control over daily life and work. But can we return to normalcy?
If only people will donate more blood. If only the airlines can be re-opened with enhanced security levels. If only the streets, roads and bridges can go back to carrying people and vehicles freely and safely to their destinations. If only there will be sufficient fuel for all our requirements. If only we can keep a supply line to our cash through the ATMs, to buy the supplies we need.
Normalcy.
The brave Mayor urges the tragedy-struck city, the financial capital of the world, to return to normalcy, to be resilient. The President rightly reminds a strong nation that its spirit cannot be broken like the steel skin of the WTC that simply melted, causing the monumental buildings to implode. His stirring message is that civilized values of human freedom, democracy and peace can never be destroyed. And no suicide bomber can attack these immortal words:
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" [Thomas Jefferson, rough draft of the American Declaration of Independence]
These inexhaustible human values will prevail. The callous inhumanity and wickedness of the perpetrators, which defies all human logic, will not win this new phase of war that has come into the world.
The cell phone calls from the doomed hostages on board the hijacked jetliners reveal a tragic last grasp of freedom held in their hands before they perished as the planes plunged to destruction. They were clinging to freedom until the end.
The queues in New York to the ATMs in the aftermath of the catastrophe show that the ATM, like the cell phone, can be a supply-line to the outside world, that it is part of the freedom of movement of modern people. Using an ATM is an assertion of the people's right to control the flow of cash belonging to them, from the protected environment of the bank, into their hands, at any time of day or under any conditions - even in a war-zone, where ash, soot, debris and office paperwork still lay scattered around the streets.
The ATM first became inextricably associated in my mind with freedom of movement one day this year, after many years of taking cash machines for granted, almost as one would a public utility.
While withdrawing cash at an ATM in Warsaw, Poland's capital, earlier this summer, within what was once the dreaded borders of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto, I felt a sensation come over me that I was carrying out an act of freedom on free soil. Drawing Polish Zlotys from the ATM, I was standing on free land, land liberated first from Nazi occupation and then, more recently, from Communist control.
Suddenly I felt proud of the ATM as a liberating piece of self-service banking technology. That moment has changed for good the way I see the cash machine.
After that, I began to put two and two together, understanding why the Soviet Union had not allowed ATMs to be installed in Warsaw pact countries. For the ATM gives more power to the individual to control his cash supply and bank accounts: not something a government intent on centralized control of the population would want to encourage. Many countries in Central and Eastern Europe only started installing ATMs after they had become free, independent democratic countries.
And the New Yorkers queuing to get hold of cash at ATMs after the attacks were exerting their right to freedom of movement, as I had done in the liberated space that had once been under the bondage of the cruel and deadly Warsaw Ghetto.
Freedom is being in control of your own destiny. It is being free of oppression, including the oppression of inhuman terror.
America is trying to restore control and normalcy, so that it can move beyond any vestiges of the oppression of fear and terror, so that its cherished ideal of freedom can once again reign supreme in the land that has done so much to shape our modern democratic concept of freedom.
And there are parallels between the events in New York and Washington and the terrible times in Warsaw during the latter half of World War Two. When I made the cash withdrawal in Warsaw that sunny afternoon recently, I was on my way to visit Warsaw's Ghetto Heroes monument and its solemn marble Umschlagplatz, with its engravings of the first names of victims of Nazi genocide from the Ghetto. You can read these words on the Umschlagplatz: "Along this path of suffering and death, over 300 000 Jews were driven in 1942-3 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps."
What words can be engraved on the monument to this new tragedy in the United States? How many thousands of names finally will be written there?
The Nazis tried to systematically crush the spirit of the Polish Jews in Warsaw. The knife-wielding terrorists who hijacked four aircraft and turned them into suicide bombs are no less evil than those who carried out the infamous genocide of the Holocaust, their intense, irrational hatred no less real than that of the Nazis.
The Warsaw Ghetto was an enclosed slum area, a death trap in which thousands died from starvation and disease, where Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps: it was constructed as a deed of cultural barbarism. The suicide attacks on America likewise were acts of cultural barbarism, of inconceivable mercilessness out of place in today's world, an assault on civilization, an attack on freedom.
But Warsaw, a city almost entirely obliterated in 1945, has risen from the rubble and ruins of war, and, since 1989, from the shadow of Soviet domination. And ATMs have sprung up all over the city. Today, it is a free city.
Today, New York and Washington are still free cities. Or are they? Are they free of fear? Are they free to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Ultimately, it is not technology that creates freedom, even when it is liberating technology like the cell phone and the ATM, which increase freedom of movement, communication and the control people have over their lives.
It is a free heart living in a free society that really defines freedom. For the kingdom of God is within.
The ATM industry supports the call of America to return to a free, normal, happy life, pursuing the great ideals immortalized by Thomas Jefferson, after the devastation of this one-day battle that is part of a new phase of war for mankind. Here is a statement issued by the ATM Industry Association to its members in response to the tragedy that demonstrates that spirit of restoration and rebuilding:
"The ATM Industry Association extends its deepest sympathies to those who have lost loved ones in the tragedy that struck America yesterday. Our heartfelt compassion and prayers go out to those impacted by the horrendous devastation. The love and fellow-feeling of all freedom-loving peoples around the world flow over to America in its hour of crisis.
11 September 2001 will forever remain a memorial day to commemorate the huge loss of life sustained. It will also mark a turning-point in modern history. The whole civilized world is united both in grief and in determination to deal decisively with the gravest threat to world peace in recent times.
The ATMIA condemns this heartless, unconscionable act of mass murder. It shares the worldwide sense of outrage that such inhuman and diabolical deeds could have been planned in safety within the boundaries of some geographical region of the world.
The ATMIA supports the principle of returning to normalcy as soon as it is safe to do so. It believes in being strong, in standing together, in solidarity. The less things are seen to grind to a halt, the sooner control over daily life and work is re-established, the more a message of strength and resilience is portrayed.
Therefore, ATMIA's planned international conference in London on Sept. 18-19 is scheduled to go ahead. The ATMIA is monitoring the situation, especially regarding any reported casualties among the human losses from within the industry and regarding the availability of international flights later in the week.
A minute's silence will be observed at the start of the London conference as a mark of reverence for those who have lost their lives."
Included In This Story
ATM Industry Association (ATMIA)
The ATM Industry Association, founded in 1997, is a global non-profit trade association with over 10,500 members in 65 countries. The membership base covers the full range of this worldwide industry comprising over 2.2 million installed ATMs.
