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What Child Is This?

In a perfect storm of a Christmas story, a grandmother places her one month old grandson in a plastic bin and shoves him into an x-ray security screening device at LAX.  The child was not noticed until he had been in the tunnel for several seconds and a screener saw, presumably, the shape of a tiny human skeleton.  (This story can be read in the LA Times.)

To completely dissect this one would take more strength than I have after making gingerbread boys this morning.   And it's just too depressing for extended consideration.   A few highlights:

• Airport security is a time wasting,  embarrassing, trash-talking joke.  More than three ounces of liquids and you're made to feel like a criminal, but whole babies gliding into the machines, sure, no problem.
• LAX is arguably the most pathetic airport in the country.  How appropriate that baby-nuking premiered here!  All the touchy-feelie murals and politically correct cultural debris sludged around the premises cannot save it from the underlying stupidity, incompetence, graft, carelessness and hysteria.
• What about "my brother's keeper"?   What in the name of heaven could the surrounding passengers have been thinking as they watched the baby go into the bin and into the x-ray? 
• Since no amount of languages could possibly reach every traveler in today's mobile world, WHY don't we have international style block graphics showing the warnings on these machines?

Well.  The baby is okay, the grandmother hopefully will forgive herself, the passengers who looked on and did nothing may reconsider their passive, heedless ways of being around others.   And perhaps this shock will help us institute an Israel-style airport security system.  Certainly our current system is a travesty, annoying almost everyone to the point of homicide while failing to detect dangerous goods and people. 

Two thousand years ago a newborn baby slept in a barn, his parents driven there by the outrages of a greedy, detached ruler and the careless establishment that profited from his policies.  How little has changed:  Today a stranger among us unwittingly sends a tiny baby into dangers created by the proud and foolish, while the not-very-wise look on in slack-jawed  apathy.  If there had been a death, better if it had been someone high in the inept management of the Transportation Security Administration.

God forgive us.  God forgive us, every one.   

Just One Question

Claudia Rosett over at PajamasMedia relays a great question from Senator Tom Coburn: Since United Nations uberguru Kofi Anan has been blathering about ethics and requiring his senior staff to file personal financial disclosures, where the heck is Kofi's?

Claudia, you're my inspiration for the day.  Now we can all fruitlessly count the days until Kofi's disclosure surfaces; probably right about the time we see Bill Clinton fess up about how many women he's - um - "mentored" - would be my guess.

So, gentle readers, what is your one question for that beloved politician, idolized media personality or sage star of the large and/or small screen?

Remembering and Doing on the 11th

TURN ON YOUR TV, ordered the nearly hysterical friend on the phone. 

I started to remind her that gratuitous TV watching was against my principles, but she cut that off with a harsh obscenity, the first I'd ever heard from her.  I don't know how long the phones will work, she said, turn on the TV and I will try to stay in contact by instant message.  Alarmed, I asked what channel, what program, what is happening?  And she began to cry as she told me "any channel, every channel, for God's sake, for once in your life, just turn on the TV and you will see."

Now I was scared.  Really scared.  Every TV channel showing the same thing?  All the phones out in the City?  My steel magnolia friend, a seasoned urban warrior, a highly accomplished woman in a tough man's profession, afraid, confused and CRYING?

Of course we all remember where we were on 9-11-2001.  I was high up in a new condo in Chicago.  Often I went to New York City to work in a building at Penn Plaza, and to stay at a place just west of the Theater District.  I loved the City and always will. I might have been there that day.

I might have been on one of those planes, too.  Routinely I visited my daughter in Maine, then flew from Boston to LA, where I did political consulting.  Or home to Seattle for a brief comforting dose of family, rain and fresh dungeness crab.  A modern Johnny Appleseed, always moving, on a crusade to make the world a better place.

But listening to dead air where my friend's voice had been, watching the sun reflect off Lake Michigan and onto my computer screen, waiting for the TV to warm up and focus on the world, I already knew things had changed.  The only question was how.

I woke my family in Seattle.  6 AM there, and they weren't gracious about my calls, but I was as abrupt with them as my friend had been with me.  Just turn on the TV, I said, and if the phones go out, check online.  For God's sake stay home, fill every container you have with water, get out the candles and the medical kits, promise me you all will stay safe at home.  And I said the same thing every American was saying: 

"I love you.  No matter what happens, just remember that I love you."

Chaos on the TV and contacts online.  Already the phones were out everywhere in the City. I morphed IMs to calls for people I'd never met; New Yorkers were desperate to let families know they were okay. I made calls to Denver and Phoenix and Atlanta, calls to both Portlands and San Diego and Newport Beach and both Kansas Cities.   Calls to strangers on behalf of other strangers, such an American thing.

Then an incoming call.  Another friend, one of those people you meet in DC, the kind that know things but never say how they know.  He was brusque and requested one word answers:  Didn't I live within a few blocks of the Hancock Tower?  Wasn't it one of the tallest buildings in the country?  Never mind, all cities are bad right now, could I pack up my dog and my laptop and some clothes and head out of Chicago, within, say, ten minutes?   Or five?

There were commercial airliners still unaccounted for, he explained.  The Air Force was scrambling every plane to get control of the skies.  I was to stay alert and quiet, pay attention to my dog's instincts,  keep my cell phone on and fully charged.  I promised to drive out into the wilds of Wisconsin, NOW, and not go home till he said so.  His last words to me: Take your gun.

Now I was terrified.

The first tower had come down while I was relaying messages.  While I stuffed critical items into my backpack and snapped the leash on the dog, the second tower sank roaring and foaming down to the earth.  Staring in disbelief, thinking of the thousands of Americans who had just literally been ground to dust, I swore never to forget.  And more, to DO what needed doing against these monsters.

Righteous anger, tears and resolve are the proper responses to the genocide now being waged against us.  Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.  And if that seems inadequate, then learn better skills, get yourself to a better place, and trade the meaningless tokens of leisure for the equipment of survival, health and defense. 

Remember the people who died simply for being Americans.  If we forget, there will be endlessly more.  Because our enemies value our deaths more than their own lives.  Because we cannot bargain with, or appease, or buy off, or hide from those who seek our destruction first, last and always.

Remember that to truly love each other, we must be alive, and free. Remember, and do.

The Insane Influence of The Land

This week I'm out of state at a church camp with one of my daughters and my baby grandson Sam. Rachel is a youth pastor and is here to support her early teenaged charges.  I'm here to help with Sam, and to do what I can for the campers.  Mostly that has meant dishes, incessant reminders about sunscreen and drinking enough water, amateur craft hours and emotional first-aid to the homesick.  Constantly listening for that panicked cry and thrashing from the lake.  Parents, you know the drill. 

Before we set out from home, I had an interesting chat with a friend.  Turns out he dislikes this state as much as I do, and for the same inadequate pathetic reason.  In the past we were both badly hurt by someone we loved, and the perpetrators were standing here when they did it.

So irrational is the human mind.

It's really a beautiful state, scenic and wild and restful.  It's a boring state, too, with not even enough culture to come to the bottom of the low tide mark in Seattle.  Just another state, really, taking the good and the bad together.  But human beings are hard-wired to associate places with events, and all our college educations and business experience and self-empowerment seminars can't take that away from us.

So it goes in the Mideast, too, a region where for thousands of years people have stood on the same ground and hurt each other.  It seems they can no more give it up than I can forgive this state for being where a boy came to college and blew off his high school sweetheart three decades ago. 

There are cases to be made for ownership of almost every inch of the Mideast by almost every group that has ever passed through there, and that includes the majority of cultures on this planet.  The one argument I haven't heard but seems most compelling to me: Judaism was first by far among currently practiced religions in the area.  So if we go by the "who was here first" argument, the Jews own it all.  Christians and Muslims came later to the party.  The Eastern religions have never made credible attempts to possess these incendiary bits of land.

More evidence that the Buddhists and Daoists and Zen Masters were wise and far-seeing;  but that doesn't help us in the current nightmare.

So there's just no acceptable historical way to divvy up that land, that's the  bottom line.  The land that has become a 24/7 textbook of our lower nature, our basest instincts, our ability to lie, scheme, manipulate and brutalize our fellow humans.  A land where people use the Giver of All Life as their excuse to take life from others.

A land where children die for nothing and their butchers are praised as martyrs.

I don't know how to fix things in the Mideast.  All I can do is what I can do.  I'm going to be here for 4 more days, and by time I leave I'm going to forgive this state.  Because like all grudges, this one hurts mostly me.  The only increase of peace will be in my heart, but any honorable peace is worth working for.   

And once you've relaxed in the pine-fresh air, swum in the sparkling lake and listened to the contrived childish whining about the "no electronic devices" policy, you're still here immersed in a culture about as deep as a solo espresso.  I need peace of heart and mind to buoy me up.   

That and the fact that I've discovered a kindred soul here, a fellow conservative with a target pistol.  And in the din of kids pounding away at their leather work, no one hears us unload a few rounds at the outline of a terrorist.  This state may be boring, but it's still the U.S.A. and my grandson is here.  I pity the families caught anywhere in the crossfires of war, but my pity doesn't save lives; it doesn't insure freedom.  After the pity must come justice, and vigilance, and duty. 

Excuse me now.  I think I heard something funny down at the lake. 

 

Unrepentant Genetic Outlaws

Our alleged elites seem on an endless quest to wrest the definition of morality away from those of us foolish enough to have listened to our parents, pastors or priests.  Away from those of us who are unwilling to play God.  But if you are smart enough to avoid the mainstream media, you may have missed this very latest folly. 

It involves, as is so commonplace today, the abuse of children.  The abuse of childhood.  The abuse, really, of the entire concept of humanity. And if you are a pregnant woman, or know one, or even pass by one on the street, you too can play this smug, sanctimonious, self-congratulatory game!

Yes, the latest to be scorned and hectored are those parents who, upon receiving a negative pre-natal screening report, refuse to abort the baby.

Genetic Outlaws. Chromosomal Renegades.  Evolutionary Saboteurs.

Why the next thing you know, Hillary might have to stock her Villages with imperfect, flawed, normal children.  The kind that have to be reared individually, one-to-one, by actual normal adults instead of fed through the pre-programmed overscheduling liberoid superkid generator.

This will never do.  Immense social pressure must be brought to bear against those who dare to assume that God knows what He is doing when He creates a person.  We have the technology to allow only the photo-op cream of the crop to be born, and by Janet Reno we'd better get with the program. Otherwise the MTV video mills and the glossy tabloids and the child pornographers might run out of pretty smiling faces and perfect young bodies.

Worse yet, a sensitive, caring, tolerant, diversity minded Democratic Voter might actually have to interface with a less than perfect child.  They know their Constitutional rights and they're not going to put up with that.

If you were rational, you'd have to wonder that the genetic police and abortion fanatics can't find better targets for their meddlesome lectures.  Islamic radicals deliberately create swarms of brainwashed child bombers and endless infant bodies for staged attacks and U.N. observer charades.  At home, unmarried, unemployed losers are not only allowed but encouraged to breed.  So why must the G.P. harass the employed, law-abiding, married parents whose only crime is to think that a person with Downs syndrome or Autism is still a person? 

True, I believe in the obligation to consider the genetic realities before conception.  People with serious inherited problems may well choose never to become pregnant.  That's quite different from the apparently healthy people who discover during pregnancy that perfection is a little further away than they might have planned, and look to abortion as the solution.

After all, once we start the engine of test-result abortion, where will it run?  If it's "moral" to abort a baby with Downs, is it "moral" to abort one with an IQ ten percent under normal?  And if this practice becomes so common that most lower IQ babies are aborted and the average IQ goes up, will babies previously considered normal become the new abortion targets?  If gross deformities get you aborted today, in twenty years will potentially average looking people get the scraper?

It's easy to champion abortion as a solution to human frailty after you yourself are guaranteed life, liberty and the right to pursue crackpot liberal ideas.  It's admittedly not so easy to devote your life to the care of a challenging, imperfect person, even when that's yourself.  But faith of all kinds and the long run of history hold that the flawed among us are often the most vital, crucial and productive. Not to mention the most inspirational.  Any civilized person out there want to argue that life would be just as good without Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

Genetic police of all degrees need to be careful what they ask for.  As we learn more about the care and feeding of the human soul, we may also learn to fix whatever defect drives people to become liberoids, busy-body sanctity inspectors, genetic police and other blights upon the body politic.  A little elective or involuntary tinkering with their brains, and we will have them right back to the way God intended them to be.

Because when you cherish the deeply defective, you cherish yourself.  The one and only perfect man already walked this earth, then left the rest of us to share the burdens of being imperfect.  There is no other meaning to life and no excuse for those who fail at this elemental task.

The truly wise would never be so presumptuous as to second-guess the Creator of All Life.  But if you believe you have the right to abort imperfection, then please get to it.  Just remember to set the example and abort yourself first.

Freedom, per Gallon

The hottest songs on the liberal Whine-a-thon lists currently involve the price of gas.  It surprises no thinking person that after decades of sabotaging petroleum exploration, drilling, refining, transportation and marketing, liberals have succeeded in creating a shortage that drives prices up. 

Remember the first and inescapable law of politics:  the only law that always passes is the law of unintended consequences.  Wild-eyed Democrats, earth-firsters and the glitterati are shocked, SHOCKED, that making something so much harder to produce, import, package and sell has made it more expensive.  More shock is on the way for these disconnected idiots. 

Rational America, Red State America, has a simple idea to lower the prices. Cut the taxes, do more exploration, more drilling, and build more refineries.  Also some kindergarten economics: when safe municipal water is available everywhere for free and bottled water still sells at double-digit prices per gallon, then gas isn't overpriced.  America is rich and gas is a necessity, not a luxury, no matter what the limousine liberals want us to think.

The current shrieking and sniveling, most of it by people who can afford mega-vehicles, vacation houses and exotic travel, is unseemly.  Not to mention just plain dumb and out-of-touch.  Voters are about to send a message to their governments and it won't be a demand for more protected acreage and wildlife at any price. 

No, we love our private transportation, our suburbs, our freedom to move about when, where and how we please.  God help anyone who tries to restrict those freedoms or increase the price of that freedom unreasonably.  Here's a memo for the Sierra Club et al: in a contest between being able to drive to the kid's little league game, the grocery store and the library, and some allegedly endangered marsh leech, the leech is going to lose.  If you don't understand why, you too are an idiot and you may leave now.

Billions of people all over the planet would love to come here and pay one-fifth of their average hourly wage for a gallon of gas.  Where they are now, gas is about a week's pay per gallon.  Not that there is much gas, or work, available. Or that it matters anyway, since there are few motorized vehicles.  And the ones that do exist are used by local thugs to drive around gunning down anyone trying to improve their lives.  By, for instance, having free markets and fast, cheap delivery of good food, safe water and GASOLINE. 

One thing these non-Americans have in plenitude is protected nature.  Bugs in their food, parasites in their water, scavengers stealing their crops, predators eating their chickens, maggots in their latrines, flies swarming over their sleeping babies.  Dirt, glorious untrammeled wildlife and no ugly industry in sight.  You'd think Hollywood's finest and the entire Democratic Congressional delegation (and staff)  would be clamoring to live there.

That instead they remain here paying three dollars a gallon for gas may be the only evidence that liberals are not terminally brain-dead.  Could there be hope?  Stay tuned for this fall's elections!

May Day Cuckoos and Tough Love

We're political junkies.  It wasn't actually raining.   We'd seen United 93  already.  So we draped ourselves in safari vests and press credentials and showed up at the Immigration Rally in Seattle. 

We stood on newspaper boxes burning up our digital cameras, a tiny minority island of the blue-eyed, blonde and native born.  Down Second Avenue poured the brunette river, phlegmatic and practical.  We were never afraid of these polite families with their home-made signs.  And I wanted so much to support their cause.  How could I not?  "We work and pay taxes."  "Liberty, Freedom, Justice."  "Our Children Are Our Future Too."

If you've raised a child you know that tough love is the easiest in the long run; but at any given moment it can hurt so bad.  And so it does here.  Yes, we're all human,  we all hope for a better tomorrow, and this magnificent country is the best hope there is.  Yes, the vast majority of illegals are not violent criminals, not terrorists, not subversives.  Yes, we came here as immigrants too, and not so very long ago either. 

But legally.  We came here legally, and that's the way it's got to be.  I wish I knew how to make it right for the families split between legal residents and illegal aliens; the long-term productive community members who must keep on the down low, the determined young born in some foreign hellhole and willing to die for a chance to be American.  When someone figures it out, I'll work to make it happen.  But amnesty for illegals, opening the borders, allowing hostile takeovers of American soil, those things aren't right and most Americans just don't support them.

Here's one thing most Americans would support.  Let's make it a crime for Moonbat Victimology Leeches to appear at these events.  Like Cuckoos putting their eggs in the other birds nests, the left keeps trying to hijack real people's issues.  It's tacky, insensitive and selfish.  Plus the polyester-clad union drones looked drab and unhealthily pale next to the stylin' Hispanics.  We've got to lose them all:

The burka wearing supporters of some jailed Islamic terrorist.  The pug-ugly man-hating radical feminists.  The union apparatchiks with their glossy banners.  The socialist workers and their smeary, unintelligible tracts.  The race-baiting black thugs.  Not to mention the truly despicable, two men in Nazi uniforms.  Even the LaRouchies gave them a wide berth.

I did see people trying to squelch dissent.  I heard race, class and gender bigotry.  I saw camera hogging and rudeness and one quickly aborted attempt to destroy a sign.  Not by the cops, press, conservatives, marchers or even the evil Nazi white guys.  No, Seattle, it was your own spoiled and willful toddlers, the classic liberals, doing the dirties.  They came to a party without an invitation and tried to trash the place when they weren't treated like stars. 

Rescind their citizenship, the citizenships of all the whining Moonbats everywhere; and give their places in the American Dream to the marchers. 

That's an immigration policy that will work.

Land of the Free, Home of the....Danes?

For the second time in just a few weeks, we find to our shame that tiny little Denmark is doing our heavy lifting for us. While the New York Times and virtually every other major paper in the free world has been busy covering their asses, inventing cowardly excuses for not publishing the most newsworthy group of cartoons ever drawn, the Danish Jyllands-Posten scooped them all again. Twelve incredibly talented writers and intellectuals, including Muslims, have risked everything by putting their names to a Manifesto against Islamic Totalitarianism.

Their words are beacons of inspiration and reason in a world that seems more cravenly insane by the day. They understand the threat of Radical Islam so well, define it so clearly. Why are we so deaf, blind and careless? Are we practicing tolerance or appeasement? Do we learn nothing as we study the run-up to World War II? Radical Islam will not be bought off, negotiated with or distracted. Only when Shari'ia is the law of every square inch of the earth will they rest. Those of us who prefer freedom, dignity, respect, diversity and democracy must, as Benjamin Franklin noted, hang together or assuredly we will all hang (or be beheaded) separately.

There are heroes of epic stature in the world today. May God bless and protect them:

http://www.jp.dk/indland/artikel:aid=3585740/

Update:  The amazing Robert Tracinski has the definitive take on this controversy.  If you're not already reading everything he writes simply as your duty to civilization, start today. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-3_3_06_RT.html