Several items in the news during the past 36 hours brings to mind that ole line from Ghostbusters. While flipping back and forth between football and Fox yesterday it dawned on me how things have changed since 9/11. Actually, it's dawned on me many times in the past, but in a muted dawning kind of way. Yesterday's was a harder dawning. Today's breathless stories are fixated on dead birds, odd smells and packages full of sprinkler parts that might have tested positive for C4. Yesterday it was Middle Eastern men driving a cargo truck speaking broken English. I'm not trying to disparage any of these events--matter of fact, I found myself caught up in the Miami drama thinking the damn truck was probably carrying a dirty bomb. And that's the point of the post.
A lot of the articles on this blog display the same mentality. That doesn't mean I'm a party pooper in real life, I just come here to poop because nobody wants to discuss this junk at work, including me. But I do feel the need to express opinions about the most serious issue of my lifetime somewhere, and after all, Blogger allows us to do it free. Actually it amounts to a form of cheap therapy, I guess.
Anyway, in thinking about this today while surfing around it became clear that I'm not alone. LA over at Political Yen/Yang has a post that really summarizes my feelings about this, including this highlight:
What the terrorists of 9-11 did besides kill thousands of innocent people, was place a seed of fear in the psyche of many Americans, by showing that they could beat us from the inside. They showed our vulnerabilities so much that most every time there seems to be an incident like the ones cited here, there is more media spin than is necessary.Exactly, and if I might add, the 'cry wolf' syndrome is phase two. And that's just the after effects of bin Laden.
Just look what Saddam Hussein has caused. Even at room temperature he's still managing to divide the country. Real Clear Politics has a good article about that, but it's the same old story and the same old choices.
We're coming up on another Bush speech and if the pre-speech leaks are to be believed he's not going to change direction, just stay the old one with more vigor. That won't play well with the peeps, since half the country falls in line with the "it's time to bring this war to a close" mentality displayed by Pelosi and Reid while the other half is convinced we're not doing enough, illustrated in part by the captured Iranians who suffered no recriminations after being caught sowing discontent in Baghdad.
It's still amazing people believe we can just pick up our toys and come home with no ill effects whatsoever, as if the Iraq war was some failed government initiative like midnight basketball. I think it's partly denial, another side effect from the attack. Denial is what causes the nutty 9/11 professors to believe the buildings were blown by Bush and not terrorists--chaos is scary. The same thing has probably led me into believing there are underlying plots going on behind the scenes in this war that can't be revealed. It beats believing the whole thing is a rudderless blimp careening around at the whim of a few people.
I'm starting to ramble so we'll wrap this up. In closing, here's a toast to those of you who can truly live life one day at a time and appreciate what you've got. The terror threat is real and our professionals are doing a good job, but it cannot drive our lives. Personally I'm looking forward to some cheese popcorn and a ball game tonight so long as the mystery fart gas cloud doesn't drift over the stadium.
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