Tomorrow morning my son is supposed to be getting on an airplane to come for a visit. He’s twenty years old and a freshman in college. He has a whole life of weekends to look forward to and has made plans to spend his next one with me. Needless to say, I’m thrilled and hope there will be many more times like it in the years to come. This morning, however, I read about events in England that make me question whether I can know that with any degree of certainty. Authorities have uncovered a plot devised by some unknown terrorists to blow up airplanes. Their weapon of choice? Liquid explosives. Now all liquids are to be banned on future flights. My questions now? Will I see my son tomorrow and, even if I do, can I really expect that all the plots next devised by such people who intend to kill us will be uncovered before they succeed? Ultimately, I guess I’m trying to figure out whether the world in which my son will live the remainder of his life is the same as that in which I grew up as a child?
Forty years ago a British invasion only seemed to involve a relatively innocuous landing of excellent rock bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Notwithstanding the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War and Vietnam, it was the days when two parents and their children gathered in their respective homes every evening to watch the likes of Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, Mr. Ed and Laugh-In. Everybody knew that Russia, China and America had the bomb, but deep down in our hearts we all held to the conviction that the leaders of these countries knew better than to ever use it. After all, to do so would have precluded our being able to see the next week’s episodes of My Favorite Martian and Star Trek, and, back then, everybody knew that simply would not have been geo-politically acceptable.
By comparison, however, today we have reality T.V. We watch people eat live bugs, or continuous live news coverage of every sort of war and just about any other atrocity that may happen anywhere around the globe, or American Idol. And we who are old enough to remember Opie and Aunt Bea think, “What difference does it make anyway?” It would seem that only in a few homes today are mom and pop still sitting and watching this stuff with their children anymore anyway. Heck, in more ways than one marriage no longer means what it used to mean. And even those marriages of the traditional variety don’t seem to last more than but just a few years anymore anyway, and so our notions of what families used to be have also gone by the wayside.
It as if none of us speak the same language anymore. But is it any wonder why? Few of us who are neighbors even seem to have been born in the same country, but we really can’t know this for sure, because most of us rarely talk to our neighbors anyway. And, what’s more, nobody seems to know for certain which is the cause and which is the effect. The only thing we seem to be able to know for sure is that all people are welcome today to set up shop in our country, and none are to be discriminated against even if their very presence makes a mockery of our laws. To that end, we’ve obliterated any meaning our nation’s borders once stood for, even though by doing so we might quite possibly be allowing some who would profess to be our mortal enemies to live amongst us. How more open minded could we as a people possibly be? Perhaps that is one factor that has brought us to be a people entertained by the likes of watching others eat live insects.
And, that brings up another subject. Who, by the way, are our enemies these days? I’m not even sure I know anymore. Are they members of Islam? Certainly not all of them, but just as surely, some of them are. And that religion spans many nationalities across the globe that makes who are and who are not actual enemy combatants in this nebulous conflict for all practical purposes impossible to identify beforehand. How can we know who is a member of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Hamas living in this country, unless they either tell us so or act upon their beliefs in such a way that the damage to us becomes an accomplished fact? So, I guess the question then becomes, how do we fight a war like the one we evidently have involved ourselves in? And of course, the corollary questions then become: if we can’t fight it and hope to win, how do we now get ourselves out of having to fight it?; who stands as a representative of our enemy that we can petition for peace?; and is that enemy we now confront even capable of making a collective decision to stand down in pursuit of an amicable resolution of our differences? Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to just persuade all of mankind to lay down their weapons to save the world based on the argument that it’s the only planet with chocolate. But short of that, there seems to be no quick fix to the pickle we find ourselves in. And that leaves parents like me, who love their children even more than they love themselves, hoping that their children will miraculously be able to resolve the problems that my generation seems to have created.
The bottom line is I would really like to see my children frequently in the future as they lead full and complete lives of their own, just as much as I so strongly hope today that tomorrow I will be able to see my son arrive safely for his visit this weekend. It’s just that the certainty of it all seems to be significantly less than when I was his age, and to me, that is sad.
© 2006 Clifford C. Nichols, Esq.
Cliff Nichols is an attorney practicing criminal defense in Santa Monica, California. He may be contacted regarding this editorial at either (310) 917-1083, cliff@cliffnicholslaw.com or www.cliffnicholslaw.com and you may join his blog at www.thedailystand.com