I will admit I'm a huge Steyn fan, face it how often do we follow along like sheep............expecting the gov'ment to keep us safe when that is the last thing they(city,county,state,fed,world/un?) can do.

Even your fellow citizen(note the 5 folks watching the 22 year old thug punching the 91 year old in Detroit)

The 9-11 hijackers had like 56 drivers licenses among the 19 of then. The Ft. Dix-6 had 50 or so mistomenor infractions in the last few years.

You are your own bodyguard.

H9

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/262/26/



UNCLE SAM AND THE SHOELESS SHUFFLE
Steyn on America
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

Here’s a sign of the times. On July 6th 1916, Leslie’s Weekly gave its cover over to a portrait of a finger-pointing Uncle Sam by James Montgomery Flagg. And with the finger-pointing came a question: “What Are You Doing For Preparedness?” – ie, preparedness for war. When it came, Mr Flagg’s rendering of Uncle Sam was pressed into service again, for a famous recruiting poster:

I Want You For U.S. Army

I saw that portrait again the other day. Same uncle, same finger, new war. This latest poster is above the machine that scans your shoes and cellphone and loose change at Burlington Airport, Vermont. The familiar Flagg figure now bears an updated slogan:

Uncle Sam Needs You To Be Safe.
A message from the Department of Homeland Security

It was a long line at security. So I had time to wonder how the government’s poster would strike Ben Franklin or whoever wrote the words usually attributed to him: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” And I had time to reflect on the pronounced Orwellian frisson of the slogan as I shuffled forward sans shoes, sans Blackberry, sans everything. The slo-mo rituals of airport security are all the “war on terror” means to most Americans, and may well be all that survives once a new president is sworn in. It’s theater for the most part: You show your picture ID, but so what? Everyone’s got picture ID. The 9/11 guys had multiple picture IDs. And many American states provide, as a matter of policy, picture ID to people who are in the country illegally. But we go along with the theater, and the weary shuffle, as a TSA man walks along the line bellowing at us to make sure we don’t have prohibited items, such as a large tube of toothpaste or the weaponizable quart of New Hampshire maple syrup for my aunt with which my little girl foolishly tried to board the plane the other day.

And every few minutes over the speaker a voice tells us that the Department of Homeland Security has “raised the threat level to… [dramatic pause] orange.” He drops an octave on “orange”; it’s the butchest “orange” you’ve ever heard. Invited to come up with a rhyme for the famously unrhymeable fruit, Irving Berlin proposed “door hinge”, which I always thought was pretty feeble. Berlin’s fellow lyricist Sammy Cahn explained to me that “orange/door hinge” rhymes in a certain kind of dense Bronx accent, but I said I’d traveled widely in the Bronx interior and wasn’t persuaded. Yet this deep manly octave-dropping voice on the airport intercom almost pulls it off: the threat level has been raised to oorhinge.

“Orange” is the level below “red”, which presumably is when someone nukes Des Moines. “Orange” means “high risk of terrorist attacks”. Does it feel like “orange” to you? After the Virginia Tech massacre, there was a spirited exchange (to put it mildly) at National Review Online about whether a nut with no firearms expertise should have been able to kill dozens of people quite so easily. My colleague John Podhoretz sided with many of our correspondents who felt it was unreasonable to expect young persons on a remote college campus to be prepared for such an attack and to have any clear idea of what might be done to lessen its effects.

Which is a reasonable position. Except that America is supposedly a nation at war. John wrote a bestselling book called Bush Country whose very first page is solely concerned with Bush as leader of a nation at war. Yet he, like everyone else, seems subconsciously to have detached the nation from the war. If some murderous attack took place at Burlington College or UVM, no doubt commentators would say, well, it’s a bucolic college-town setting, last place in the world anyone would be expecting anything. Yet those students have to get to the terminal an hour early to board a 16-seat puddle-jumper because Burlington Airport is such a critical front in the national defenses that it’s on permanent Code Orange.

That disconnect is not as wide as first it appears. The “gun-free zones” of the college campuses and the Code Orange security lines at small airports are operating on the same principle. When Virginia Tech forbids law-abiding students to have firearms, they’re engaging in the same lazy universalism as airport security: they’re profiling products rather than people. To modify the bumper sticker, toothpaste doesn’t kill people; people who weaponize toothpaste kill people. But in a squeamish non-judgmental society it’s easier to target gran’ma’s overnight bag. You don’t need to wonder where the yellow went in a system that bans Pepsodent.

Uncle Sam may “need” me to be safe, but he cannot guarantee my safety any more than the “gun-free zone” of Virginia Tech guaranteed anybody’s safety. And, as for the original slogan of James Montgomery Flagg’s finger-pointer, “What Are You Doing For Preparedness?”, most of us shrug: it’s Bush’s war. In Vermont, they’re prepared mainly to oppose whatever he comes up with next. Next to me at Burlington Airport was a car with the bumper sticker “I’m Already Against The Next War”.

There’s another Flagg poster from 1917 that seems more relevant: a star-spangled gal in Phrygian camp recumbent in wicker chair as the storm clouds gather. “Wake Up, America! Civilization Calls Every Man, Woman And Child!” He can call but no-one’s picking up. We save our war footing for the Code Orange shoeless shuffle.