By PLS
Calling all parents!
I bet you have kids who like to build skyscrapers with blocks, Lego, whatever. I suspect your kids also get their biggest kicks from knocking towers down—especially the ones erected by less popular kids or by smaller, weaker siblings.
I bet you have kids who play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, Crusaders and Infidels, Star Wars, whatever. Of course, someone always has to be the bad guy, but that’s no problem.
It’s fun pretending to be the bad guy. Dressing up. Talking the talk. Walking the walk. A ten year old desperado. Darth Varder on a tricycle. Evil terrorists lurking in the lilacs. Older kids earnestly debating strategy: “How would we do it? How would we get away? Hee hee!”
Tower tumbling and role playing were a normal part of growing up in America, but times have changed. Neighbors may regard such activities as evidence of homegrown terrorism in the making and phone their suspicions to the FBI.
So your kids are in danger. Any night now the FBI will break into your house (in the wee hours of the morning, without knocking, thanks to the Roberts’ Five) and haul the kids off to juvenile court. They will probably be tortured, but don't worry. It’s legal. G.W. Bush has issued a signing statement to that effect.
And you, being patriotic, must rejoice! Kids like that are a danger to us all.
The more I contemplate the so-called plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago the more it seems only a few hairs removed from this somewhat implausible scenario. Someone, for some reason, ratted on these loony post-adolescents’ absurdly enacted wild imaginings. The FBI entrapped them. Now that they have been arrested, to great fanfare, the rest of us are supposed to feel safer. In fact, everything the Bush administration does with its ever-inflated grants of power scares me.
When I first read about the Sears Tower business, I feared the worst: a cooked up case. But I didn’t post anything because I also feared I was reacting too cynically. Evidently, however, I am not alone in my reaction. I intended to link to a few sites, but go to Google and take your pick. There are over 1500. None takes this FBI action very seriously. Many consider the arrests a blatant effort to help Republicans maintain control of Congress in November. This is encouraging. Maybe Americans are returning to sanity.
Meanwhile, I do feel sorry for the FBI. Turning on the evening news a few weeks ago, they discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrested a ring of serious plotters. The RCMP produced hard evidence to prove they'd nabbed some very nasty people. Meanwhile, our trusty Gmen haven’t managed a single haul of indictable (and convictable) terrorists since 9/11 made the FBI look incompetent. Imagine their pangs of jealousy and frustration! So the FBI swooped down on the Miami Seven—and set the whole world laughing.
I'd like to close with this thought: what if, instead of sending a faux Al Qaeda operative to entrap this sorry, impressionable bunch, our not-so-wise leaders had found a way to introduce them to someone skilled in the ways of channeling anger and frustration constructively? Into building towers, so to speak, instead of tumbling them.