Tuesday, November 2, 2004, 6:22pm
Election Day
Tuesday, November 2, 2004, 6:22pm
This evening William returned to the 6:05pm express train, and since I haven’t clue for how conductors are scheduled, I also haven’t a clue why he’s been gone several weeks or why he came back.
Right now we’re racing through Newton at max track speed, which is fast enough for me to abandon my new hobby – sniffing for unsecured WiFi networks along the route. It would be cool to get onto the Internet from the train, but it’s probably not a good idea to try, since sniffing for security holes is one thing, but accessing them violates my internal sensibilities involving respect for other people’s privacy.
After dinner I plan to vote, and from what I’ve read the queue may be daunting. But it is my right to stand there and wait if that’s what it takes. This is the most direct way I can speak to those running the federal government since I don’t possess the other time honored avenue for direct contact – a wad of cash to stuff into their back pockets.
Unfortunately votes are things that people cast for the most curious reasons – or total lack thereof. Ask most evangelicals about their reasons and it’s often solely about the candidate who best parrots their own leadership on a handful of hot-button issues – as though nothing else exists on the radar screen of governance – as though those two or three litmus tests are enough to judge character, experience, and ability.
Then there is the woman I saw quoted in the newspaper today who has a different bias. On September 11th she lost her husband on the 97th floor of the World Trade Center and from this very legitimate experience she declares how her vote is about nothing other than “security, security, security” – as though preventing terrorism in whatever form this might take should ignore all other risk factors warranting consideration.
Yet even if our efforts against terrorism prevent an impossibly unlikely death rate of 100,000 Americans year-after-year from terrorist attacks, we’d still only address 5-10% of all preventable mortality faced by every-day office workers. So is it really truly wise to focus 100% on security while ignoring the rest?
I fully understand how a sense of safety can be become paramount. Trauma creates that sort of focus. What most people in this age do not understand is how anxiety no longer equates very well with actual danger. Perhaps in a simpler time this was still instinctively true, yet in recent centuries anxiety has become nothing more than one of many clues in a world too complex to process via gut reactions.
So my message to those traumatized by 9/11 – rather than dragging everyone into your personal abyss of paranoia – take a pill! Please take a pill so that you’re no longer white-knuckling the steering wheel of your life. And my message to those controlling national policy also traumatized by 9/11 – you would save a lot more lives if you also focused on vastly greater perils like medical treatment mistakes.
It feels sometimes like the United States is a sleeping dragon lying on a huge pile of loot. Along comes some pissed-off dragon-hater who pokes the dragon’s tail and instead of seeing that his tail has been poked the dragon behaves like his very life is threatened. So he leaves his lair in a venomous rage burning every town and village within a hundred miles – all while thieves slip in to steal his loot.
History will grant a better perspective some day, but from my present observation the irrational fears cultivated after 9/11 have resulted in actions by this country as equally stupid and deplorable as that overreacting dragon. Eventually the dragon will return to discover his folly, and perhaps work to recover his treasure – all while new thieves scheme once more.
Terrorism needs to be addressed – but not obsessively without historical context and not without a sense for reasonable outcomes. What if Hurricane Ivan had struck New Orleans directly? How would we have coped with vast portions of the Louisiana National Guard deployed inside Iraq? I can only hope the dragon returns to his senses before we learn the answer to this or other similar questions through painful experience.
