The News and I have broken up so I never hear from her until the shit hits the fan. I’m still not entirely sure what’s going down in Israel and Lebanon or why, and I didn’t hear about the thwarted terrorist plot until I got home from work tonight and realized there was only one story on the national news.
It’s kind of nice not having to deal with the news anymore, since I don’t feel obligated on the ol’ blog to be on top of every story, but I’m beginning to believe that my bubble ought to be blighted.
The trip to San Jose was a wake-up call. I hadn’t been on a plane since long before 9/11 and was surprised to see the Indianapolis airport had turned into a massive security cell. Due to my ignorance, I was stopped at every gate I passed through because I was dumb enough not to remember to leave the jeans with massive metal grommets at home. Flip-flops off, pelted with bomb-detecting air vents, combed over with metal detectors, every item in my bags sniffed and scanned, I was pleased to find that at the end of the searching scheme was a very generous bar with a very generous bartender. After nerve-wracking shit like that, I needed something to calm me down during the flight in which I was certain to meet my impending doom. C’mon folks, I wanted to tell the security guards, I’m a wide-eyed yokel from Indiana. I don’t pack heat, unless you count the Bic lighter, and hey, where are you going with that?
Today I found there are a new slew of folks who had hoped to turn a series of flights into mass transit bombs who were nevertheless “thwarted” by international security measures, and I don’t know whether to bring the shock or yawn. Are these new days? New times? Or the same old shit in a different format? Being the wide-eyed hoosier yokel that I am, protected by corn fields on my land-locked island, it’s relatively easy to laugh at the measures taken to protect state landmarks like a popcorn factory that employs five workers. If I lived in a place of real interest, who knows.
Call it disaster burnout or call me a moonbat, but five years of inflammatory rhetoric and inflated language and I genuinely don’t know how to react, nor do I have it in me do raise more than an eyebrow or have a pang of pity that the world can’t just be better. Anymore, it all looks like politics to me.