Sitting Ducks

We're all sitting ducks, aren't we, really, when you come to think about it? Well, maybe not you, Bush. I imagine thay have you pretty well protected. But the rest of us, going about our daily lives? I mean, there are certain places where you can feel the presence of what we call "security." At the airport, for example, where you go through all those scans and searches before you board your plane. I understand there's security, too, in certain crowded areas, like baseball and football games.

How about theaters, though? I haven't noticed any additional security measures when I go to see a movie, even at one of those huge multiplexes. Maybe I just don't know where to look or what to look for. But I know that I don't have to walk through one of those metal detecting machines. Not yet. Nor have I seen any sign of bomb-sniffing dogs. Or how about shopping malls? Same thing. Restaurants? Big hotels?

There's no way in the world, in short, that we can protect ourselves against every scenario a terrorist could dream up. Walk around town in any small city in America, you're a sitting duck. Drive down a crowded freeway? Take the bus? For all your vaunted Homeland Security plans, there's little you can do to prevent the kind of thing that happened in London yesterday. You get a terrorist ruthless, and patient, and determined enough, and careless enough of his own life, and he'll find a way to damage you.

Which leaves us in a predicament not much different from life itself. There's no way we can anticipate all the dreadful things that might befall us at any moment. I sit here in a place where a deadly earthquake can strike at any moment. To get here, to where I'm sitting at this very moment, I spent an hour and a half on the freeways, jostling for position with trucks and trailers fifty times my size and weight, at seventy miles an hour. And people have been getting killed by bullets on the freeways hereabouts, for no apparent reason. If we're liable to be terror-struck, our daily lives are filled with source enough of terror to keep us home in bed, locked in a protective bubble and hooked up to an oxygen tube.

So whichever way you look at it, Bush, we're sitting ducks. In the vast scale of things, this current crop of terrorists do little to add to the threats that surround most of us for most of our lives. We simply don't pay attention to them in the same kind of way. And even if we do, we learn to live with them. Witness the Londoners of the Blitz. Witness those brave men and women who fight our wars for us: I've heard their psychological survival tactic is the firm belief that the next bullet is not meant for them, but for some other poor slob. The level of their sense of invulnerability has to rise to what is to me an unimaginable level. I guess we all adjust in our own way to the imminence of threat in any given situation.

I wonder, though, about you, Bush. Surrounded as you are by those nearly impenetrable layers of protection, are you in some way emotionally immunized from the reality of danger? Is it easier for you to talk the talk about your "war on terrorism"--or your war in Iraq--just because you yourself are guarded to the point of invulnerability from most of life's risks, including terrorism? Including the reality of combat? I just wonder what living in that kind of a bubble does to a person's head, Bush? Can he still relate to reality in the same way as those who do his fighting for him? Or even the same way as the rest of us, sitting ducks?