Chill in the air is not about the weather
Fall is the prettiest time of the year in New York City but I don’t think I’ll go this year. Usually my sweetie and I take the Amtrak down from Rensselaer and two hours and twenty minutes later we emerge from Penn Station ready to own the day. It’s a trip I know many of you have made sitting on the right hand side of the train on the way down so you can enjoy that gorgeous view of the river. But this year I think we’ll pass and if I’m being honest I suppose you can blame it on terrorism.
Maybe it was the truck running over people like bowling pins in France or the nut job shooting up the night club in Orlando or the recent bombings in Chelsea or the guy stabbing people at the mall; somewhere along the line we reached a tipping point. There is no more saying, “Yes it’s a dangerous world but that stuff only happens over there.” There is no more “over there” when it comes to terrorism. It is happening here and happening more frequently and you can’t help but think the worse is yet to come. Would you be shocked tomorrow to learn a man walked onto a busy street in Chicago, Miami or L.A. and opened fire on shoppers? No, you would not. You’d barely flinch. That’s how bad it has become. That is the new normal.
People are fond of saying you have to live your life and do whatever you want to do and to alter your behavior in any way is tantamount to the terrorist winning. Hogwash. Live your life, yes, but there is nothing wrong with being smart and avoiding large crowds right now. There are too many people in America right now who don’t like America and they are typically undereducated, underemployed and under the impression that Isis or jihad is the answer. They can go online and get a quick tutorial on how to build a bomb with items they can pick up at their nearest Home Depot. That is the sad reality show we are all living.
What is the solution? I don’t know that there is one. I do know we have to look long and hard at who we are letting into the country and raise a few red flags when people travel back and forth to countries that hate us. That is not racist or xenophobic, it is just common sense. I don’t want us profiling people or harassing people but we need to address the issue of these socalled home-grown terrorists at the root level. If people see suspicious activity from someone on their street they have to pick up the phone and not worry about being labelled something for speaking up. I swear sometimes we are more worried about being impolite than we are of getting hurt by the next attack.
I hate to say this, but we also need more cameras. I read George Orwell just like you did in 9th grade English class and I too worry about Big Brother, but the reality is in the recent bombings in New York City and the ones we saw in Boston it was surveillance cameras that were instrumental in solving the crimes. We have the best investigators on the planet but they need the tools to protect us and if putting a few more cameras up in a hostile world helps catch these guys then so be it.
America has become one big soft target. We have treated immigration, legal and otherwise, as if everyone trying to come in has the best intentions. Recent events make it clear that is not always true. That does not mean rounding up people we perceive as the enemy or tapping everyone’s cell phones, but instead asking everyone to be honorary deputies in this war on terror and encourage them to watch every inch of the world they reside in and speak up when they see or hear anything sketchy.
Things will get worse before they get better and until that time I will make my trips to the big city less frequent. I will avoid the large crowds when I can. And I absolutely will support spending the money on our police and first responders to get the equipment and personnel they need to protect us.
The first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one. This world today is not the Hallmark card we grew up in all those years ago. People are trying to hurt us and calling them “lone wolves” and doing linguistic contortions to avoid having honest and direct dialogue about who these terrorists are and who feeds their evil ideology doesn’t make us one whiff safer. Those are simply the tricks of politicians who like to tell you how safe you are while they themselves hide behind 10 foot high fences, surrounded by armed guards. There is a chill in the air and it has nothing to do with the weather.