Welcome Instapunditters
: The post on the post-post-feminist He Decade below.
The hunker bunker
: Call me crazy but I just canceled our family’s spring vacation to DisneyWorld.
I simply don’t feel safe. It’s one matter for me to put myself at risk; I know I will end up flying for work again. But it’s quite another matter to put my family at risk.
I don’t feel safe in the air, because I don’t believe that much has changed at airports since Sept. 11. Gates are still guarded by too many uneducated and unprepared slugs. Bags aren’t inspected. Cockpit doors are flimsy. Terrorists are still at large.
Don’t try to give me a lecture about odds, how I’m more likely to be taken down by a tse-tse fly than a terrorist.
I was only a few hundred yards below two jets that hit two buildings, all full of lives that aren’t here any longer. Death was too close.
I used up my odds that day.
So I worry about flying and I even worry some about DisneyWorld. The terrorists scoped out the place and other key destinations; I haven’t heard much about increased security there (or Disney didn’t bother to tell me; they didn’t even bother to ask why I was canceling many thousands of dollars of business with them).
This is why I get so worked up over the lack of apparent action from Ridge and Ashcroft. This is real. It is changing the way we live.
This weekend, I took my kids to see the latest Disney movie (irony noted), Return to Neverland, a Peter Pan sequel that begins in a London suffering under the blitz. This, of course, was terror, constant terror, on a greater scale. The children in the movie — Wendy’s children — are growing up in war; they are facing transport to the country to keep them safe; they are giving up childish things and they are turning into adults long before their time.
I look down the row at my kids and realize that they, too, are growing up during war on their homefront. It’s a different war but it’s war nonetheless and it is changing their lives. It’s even robbing them of DisneyWorld.
I feared I was crazy worrying about flying on our vacation; I thought that perhaps it was just me; it was about being so close and not being able to get away from the event. But when the subject was finally broached, my wife agreed quickly. My parents were relieved. My eldest was wondering whether we’d go and understood why we aren’t.
So I canceled Disney. I called the airline but first went online to discover that they had canceled my flights, thanks to terror’s travel recession, so I got a full refund on my nonrefundable ticket. “Meant to be,” said my wife.
I made new reservations at an undisclosed location outside Washington; I’ll say hello to Cheney for you all as I hunker in my bunker this vacation.
