If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
I hate daytime running lights, although for a somewhat contradictory reason. I certainly think it’s a grand idea for people to have lights on, particularly in fog and rain when they might not otherwise think of it, but the problem is that daytime lights aren’t bright, and usually they don’t turn any lights on in the back of the car. So a person gets into the car, fires it up, notes that their daytime lights are piercing through the fog sufficiently, and then drives off, not thinking a whit about the fact that they are virtually invisible to traffic behind them.
This is insanely dangerous; I was once travelling up I-95 on a Sunday morning in heavy, heavy fog. There was little traffic, but even my speed-demon self was driving a careful 50mph (as opposed to my normal 65+), but that didn’t keep me from nearly destroying a family in a Honda who were driving no more than 30, with no lights on whatsoever. They were completely invisible until I nearly rear-ended them.
I should start with the following caveat: everyone should be allowed to do their own mourning, in their own way. So if getting through September 11th requires you to listen to horrible Lee Greenwood songs* and wear an American flag shirt and assign blame, I shan’t stand in your way. Personally, I spent the day participating in two healing religious services, even though my skepticism about the existence of God remains strong. But you gotta do you, boo.
I’ve heard a lot of argument about whether the 9-11 perpetrators “won.” I guess it depends on your perspective; if you look at it from the specific standpoint of the guys who flew the planes, well, they’re dead. Not much winning to be found there. If you look at it from the standpoint of Al Qaeda, they are reportedly weaker than they’ve ever been, and it seems like a Predator drone is killing the #1 or #2 guy in that organization about every other week. But if you look at it from the perspective of America, well, let’s just say there don’t seem to be any winners. Let’s break it down:
- Safety. This has two actual components: actual safety, and the feeling of safety. By way of example, if lots of people in your town got concealed carry permits and started hauling around roscoes, studies indicate that your community will safer (or at least have less crime, which is admittedly not EXACTLY the same thing). But do you FEEL safer, knowing that everybody’s armed? Probably not.
So first, do you feel safer? I don’t, particularly, although I also know the answer to the other question. If you think that the extra measures at the airport, the Department of Homeland Security, and various wars and police actions make us safer, well then I guess we must be safer, right?
Here’s the problem, though: given the number of folks who sneak across the border every day, how hard do you think it is for a determined person to get into the United States, particularly if he only intends to stay long enough to make himself a bomb vest and blow up a shopping mall. I’m still amazed it doesn’t happen every other week (like it does in the various countries we’re attempting to democratize). I don’t think we’re one whit safer than we were 10 years ago. Possibly less so, since as a country we’ve made a cottage industry out of blowing up other people’s actual cottages, which seems to piss them off a great deal.
- The economy. We all know it’s for crap right now, and as long as the Republican Party has a say in governing the country, it’s likely to remain so. And admittedly, the failures that kicked off the current recession were not 9-11-dependent. I wonder if the bottom might have been a little shallower if we hadn’t had to drop trillions on defense, though.
- Prosecution of perpetrators. This has been completely screwed up from the beginning, and isn’t getting better, because we treat 9-11 as a declaration of war. I’ve got news for you: a couple thousand guys living in caves in Pakistan can’t declare war. They are not a nation-state. What they can do is commit crimes, for which they should be prosecuted and punished. If you can’t get to them because they’re being shielded by the country they’re living in, that’s another matter; I didn’t have much of a problem with going into Afghanistan for this reason, and it sucks pretty bad that we can’t go into nuclear-capable Pakistan to do the same thing.
This has all been said before, I’m obviously not breaking a lot of new ground here. But I still feel like elevating terrorists to the level of an actual country by declaring a “War on Terror” emboldened them a hell of a lot more than any war protest. Terrorists are criminals, no matter their aims. Treat them that way.
*I posted on Facebook about how much I hate “God Bless The U.S.A.” I stand by it. It is completely insipid, and painfully manipulative.
If tomorrow all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again, with just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars, to be livin’ here today.
‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.
You probably wouldn’t have healthcare, of course, so good luck with that.
Animal rights
My house will be beachfront property
