First writing sample!!

This is the first of my many writing assignments that you will have the privilege(???) of reading! I've often been told that I'm a better reporter than writer (that might just be a nice way of saying that I'm a worse writer than a reporter!). But either way, I think it's true.

For this assignment, we were told to go out to our beats (the areas we're covering) and talk to people on the streets about how they have been impacted by Sept. 11 and by the attacks in London, and write a story about it. This is mine. . .

As a flight attendant, Sandy Jack, is well aware of terrorism. She and other crew members she works with at an international charter airline are told to be extra vigilant when traveling in foreign countries.
Yet, Jack, an Ozone Park resident in her early 30s, insists she doesn’t let it affect her daily life or the way she brings up her son. “You can’t dwell on it,” she says, biting into a kebab she has purchased from a street vendor in Jamaica, Queens, while her son dozed in his stroller. “What is going to happen is going to happen.”
Jack is not the only one with this laissez-faire attitude. Shoppers stream into and out of shops on Jamaica Avenue, more intent on bargains than bombs, the thought of terrorism apparently far from their minds. The only reminder of the threat of terrorism on the busy street is a T-shirt that proclaims, “United we Stand,” worn by Samuel Wright, a bearded black man in his mid-50s, handing out fliers promoting a dental clinic.
Asked how he views the threat of terrorism, he proclaims, “They’re not going to terrorize me. The Man Above has your number. If it’s your time, it’s your time. Leave it up to the Lord.”
While his T-shirt might be seen as a sign of his patriotism, he says that his love for his country is by no means unequivocal. Both he and Jack say that the US invited trouble by going to war with Iraq in the first place. “I love this country, but not everything about it, and certainly not its president,” Wright says. “I did not vote for Bush, I knew he was lying the first time.”
For others, like Sadia Mohmamed, from Queens Village, Queens, the threat of terrorism has been an opportunity to see the good nature of New Yorkers. Mohammed, in her mid-20s, wears a hijab – as Islamic headscarf – wrapped around her head and shoulders. But, she says, she has not had a hard time either after Sept. 11, or after the more recent London bombings. “If anything, I’ve felt like people have tried harder to show their support,” she says. “They’ve tried to show women like me, who show that they are Muslim, that it’s ok to be yourself. They don’t want us to feel like we are part of (the terrorism that) has been going on.”
It is not just civilians who are relatively unaffected. Sgt. Everton L. Johnson, station commander at the US Army Recruiting Station on Jamaica Avenue, says not much has changed on the US Army’s recruitment front either. If anything, he has seen interest in the US Army increase in the past few months.
Despite negative coverage by the press, Johnson views the fact that the war has increased the public’s awareness of the army in a positive light.
And, while Jack and Wright see the United States’ involvement in Iraq as meddling, Johnson has a different view. “Everyone has an opinion and thinks their opinion is right,” he says. “I’m not here to say that anyone is wrong. But, I believe we have a duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves.”