Holding our Breathe

Since 9/11, I believe we all have held our breathe waiting for the next shoe to drop. Or for underwear to blow up.  Truly this is an irony my mom would appreciate.  She always said wear clean underwear since you never know when you may have to be taken to a hospital.  A collective asthma of fear grips us instead of the humor of the situation, though.

Personally, I believe that our security organizations are justifying their existence by coming up with new and expensive ways of checking people in.  New names for old things.  Hand pats are so much better and so much cheaper.  But we opt for new technologies that are expensive and fail us -- thus costing even more when people die.  And the organizations created to protect us?  Hah!  They continue to claim that the vertical stack of each organization is why they could not pass information along in a timely manner.  They haven't changed that whopper since 9/11.

If grassroot groups like animal rescue can set up and create successful animal rescue runs by posting them online and requesting drivers, then surely there can be no excuse for governmental agencies claiming that they cannot do the same thing.  So why don't these groups set up inter-intra-communications?  Because the process of sharing requires something secret keepers cannot do.  They cannot admit weakness.  And they view laterally reaching out as failure.  Put simply reaching out scares the hell out of these groups.  I have to ask, since when have we become so scared of our own fellow Americans who also have sworn oaths to uphold the United States of America?

And this asthma of fear on the governmental level is intolerable.  Surely, with the economic failures of the past year and the failure of the Bush or current administration to address it properly, there are plenty of people who are angry and frustrated.  This is not a good situation.  It certainly creates an environment friendly to those who would recruit suicide bombers.  It won't take long before we find attentat actions and anarchism in the country.  The hell with the foreign terrorism.  The U.S. has a long history of taking action for itself.  The killing of President Garfield?  A disgruntled favor seeker.  The blowing up of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City?  A disgruntled vet protesting the Waco incident.

It seems to me that progress is just renaming of things to sound new.  The writer of Ecclesiastes had it right.  See this link to the full quote as printed in Bartelby's  http://www.bartleby.com/108/21/1.html  This is wisdom literature that we, sadly, lack in this time of 24/7 news bites.  Nothing can be learned in this environment.  But perhaps we can change in 2010.  I pray that is so.

Happy New Year folks and may peace rain down softly upon us.

until then
namaste