We headed to Block Island for my birthday last Sunday. A charming old whaling stopover. Usually nice and safe…Hmmm. Well, maybe not. We’ve spent god knows how many billions in wars and bureaucratic fat and you name it…including wonderful torture techniques. We noted the ferry from Pt. Judith to Block Island required the company of a U.S. Coast Guard zodiac with a 50-caliber machine gun mounted in the front. A wicked looking weapon to say the least. Naturally, it would have been useless should someone have secreted an explosive on-board. So our enemies now see Block Island as a strategic objective?
The presence of a gang of Middle-East youths speaking Arabic made some passengers—not me—nervous, until they began to demonstrate they were members of an alternate lifestyle, and thus exempt from enrollment in a fundamentalist terror brigade. Indeed, they would have been candidates for the beheading block in the Saudis’ fiefdom. (I guess that’s okay, they’re our allies.) Anyway, Block Island, with its cliffs, ponds, rolling hills and charming taverns was as pleasant as ever and worth biking on.
But we certainly were never safe. In fact, San Diego had a power outage last week that left the city effectively crippled. The cause—terrorists? Nah. Good old fashioned deregulation—or put it short, greed and incompetence. Those billions might protect us from some terrorist attack that’s hypothetical. The collapse of medical, educational, transportation, financial, power, etc. infrastructures are real and ongoing and deserve those dollars far more. Anyway, the Coast Guard boat was at least a good photo op for the tourists.
Marc Songini 