Our Future

Our Future

Here’s what I remember.  A time when I could run to a plane five minutes before it took off, disembark onto a Florida tarmac under balmy skies and waving palms to pick my bags off an outdoor carousel with no one watching.  Entebbe changed that.  I’ve learned to deal with taking off my shoes and throwing out my 4 ml bottles at security, standing in front of a machine to be body searched and standing in line, sometimes for hours to have my ID inspected. 

Here’s what I remember.  Going to Washington DC and visiting the White House, the Capitol, the museums and memorials without walking through metal detectors or standing behind barricades hundreds of yards away.  911 changed that.

Here’s what I remember.  Watching Sesame street and Mr. Rogers (actually I never liked him) or Howdy Doody (yeah really.)  My violent show was Rin Tin Tin who was so cute you couldn’t really hate when he bit somebody.  Now I visit my grandchildren to find them spending multiple hours a day with their friends from all over the country, engaging in social network war games where they kill the enemy and splatter his brains and guts all over the tv screen with as much emotion as they would swat a fly.  Sandy Hook will change that.  

This is the choice.  If we don’t step up and control our guns, we will do something.  William Bennet, conservative former secretary of Education suggested that it might be appropriate to have an armed guard in our schools.  That won’t be enough.  We’ll need barricades too, metal detectors, and preferably towers at each corner with machine gun nests to keep watch on all incoming traffic.  Our children won’t be able to carry back packs.  They’ll take their shoes off and God forbid they forget their ID.  They’ll enter school having transmitted their homework over secure networks, (hopefully no child pornography hackers will get a hold of that) ready to sit down and concentrate on the wonderful world of learning, trying not to look at the guard towers.  We as a country will be secure in knowing that our children will be better equipped to form “well regulated militias’ than our founding fathers ever would have imagined.  And if a bad guy enters their school and gets past the guards they’ll be right there to blow him away with their own guns.  Because, by then you know there will be plastic guns that they can get through any metal detectors anyway.