Grrr

I don't really like ranting about politics in a blog but today I can't resist.

President Bush, stating the oh-so-obvious, recently declared that "America is safer but we are not yet safe." Well, duh. And we're never going to be. If anything pissed me off after September 11, it was that America's response was to insinuate that we could throw enough money at "homeland security" and the "war on terror" to make ourselves supremely, completely, 100% safe. Anything short of that was viewed as failure.

Well, get over it. We will never be safe. Especially not if we never have the humility to admit that we cannot be in control of the entire world. I'm not saying we should dismantle the CIA and let people walk on planes with AK-47s, but what we're doing now is kind of like playing that wack-a-mole game at Chuck-E-Cheese... you hit one mole and another one pops up somewhere else, and they never really go away, and you throw a lot of money and energy into trying to continue life as usual when maybe life isn't usual anymore. The world is a messy, complicated, place with a lot of crazy shit going on, and have we been sheltered from the reality of that for so long that we think we can be immune? It's as if we've extended our personal obsession with immortality to the national level. It won't happen to us. It can't happen to us. And if it happens to us, we're going to sue someone and buy a lot of duct tape so it never happens again.