A return to Normalcy

On September 12th, 2001 I was almost a Republican. I was mad. I was willing to give up my liberties for the sake of any slim appearance of safety. I was not the only liberal who felt this way. But now it's almost four years later and any cells in my brain that wanted to join the GOP have surely been replaced with common sense. But the fact remains that I, Jimbo "a Mary-Kate Olsen waistline right of Nader" Hesky, changed--and then changed back.

It happens all the time to all of us. You're driving along and try to find a radio station or change CDs, and in the half second that it took you to locate your Ben Folds Five CD the car in front of you slams on the breaks and you almost plow into them. You sit there gripping the wheel with both hands and breathing like you're about to birth a teenager as your heart beats like an out of control metronome. You tell yourself that music is not worth dying for, so you promise yourself you'll only change the CD when the car is parked in your driveway. Within a week you're back to being a regular DJ going 55 in your Dodge Stratas.

With the recent attacks on London, the right is trying to drum up that same fear that was created on 9/11. John Gibson, Neil Cavuto, Bill O'reilly and the other pundits who spew White House talking points with their 60 mintues each weeknight have all been speaking about how the London attacks are a reminder that we have to let big brother watch us commute, work, commute home, and then figure out which porn sites we're visiting.

Gibson and Cavuto each wrote about their love of the 1.5 million cameras all over London, and made it clear that they would love to see cities like New York or DC look more like a department store than a major metropolitan city. For the party that's supposed to be about small government they seem to be pumping it up like a major league baseball player. And if you think that Cameras are perfect because they show exactly what happened with no room for the infallibility of memory, just ask the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was mistaken for one of the terrorists and shot by London Police last week.

So let's not rush to decisions when it comes to how we deal with terror--again. We already stuck ourselves with the USAPATRIOT Act, we should chalk that one up to a mistake under pressure and a lesson learned. We must return to the normalcy that we had on September 10th. The next time a Republican mentions that we're living in a "post-9/11 World", remind them that we're also living in a "post December, 7th World" ("A day that will live in infimy"), but we let the Japanese out of the internment camps and apologized.

It's ok to be scared, but it's important that we remember what it was like before we shat our pants at the sight of a Middle Eastern male getting on the same plane as you. If you can't remember what that's like, then go home and get on Kazaa or Limewire or BitTorrent or whatever newfangled device you kids use these days and watch "The Siege" and remember who the bad guy is in the end.