It was one of the members of the 9/11 commission who reminded the world on NPR the other day.  He’d either been taught the wisdom in the military, or been taught it by a military man, such as someone intelligent enough to have achieved the General rank.  Although I’ve been roundly in Ghandi’s flock since the days of the students‘ striking of the Universities in protest of the Vietnam War, I’ve recognized these men as leaders, and not bloodthirsty hawks, as they seem to continue to be appraised.  I don’t think these men get us into war, but rather embrace might as a means to end it.  Really.  Don’t look at me so dumbfounded.  Stay calm; carry on.  Brilliant.

Why can we not?  Politics has been happening to us for a long time now, but never so much so smack blast in our faces.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed it so much or not, but Superfreakonomics spoke to me just the other day about how the population of our globe has nearly tripled since I was born in 1951.  Tripled in about 60 years.  Are you kidding me?  I almost never even use an iPod, but I think I have at least five of them in my nearby possession.  It’s insane; I’m insane.  Why don’t I magnanimously up and give four or so away?  I can’t answer that question; do I really think I need one in every piece of baggage I own.  Wow, there we go:  baggage.  Interesting word, that.  It, or they — a most beloved and talented professor/mentor of mine used to say ‘baggages’, translated from the Japanese — can be so useful, yet the connotation has become almost insistently negative.

So here we go again with my lambasting of these glorious United States.  I was traveling home from spending the 2009 holidays in Indonesia, carrying four items on board with me, mostly because they would have become obliterated were I to stuff them inside one of my ‘checked’ baggages.  Not being Indonesian, and not having resided anywhere near a place where I could drool over the International Herald Tribune (probably my absolute favorite journal on the planet, if you don’t count the Atlantic or Harper’s), I’d had no idea about the Nigerian idiot who somehow carried explosives in his underwear onto a plane in Detroit, Michigan on Christmas day, which would be a great for some nutcase kamikaze devotee of Islam’s insistence that these glorious United Sates are the devil incarnate, if indeed they buy into the idea of Devil — I’ll admit that I’m unsure, not being a religious scholar.  (In fact, having returned to the U.S., many had emailed me concerned about the attacks in Indonesia, which is exactly the point; for me they had never even existed.)