Standing in Line. Again.

Every time I stand in a runway-long line at airport security, I think, the terrorist has won. And frankly, it annoys me. The current airline crises is directly related to Islamic terrorism and is costing us billions of dollars in additional security, logistics costs, and lost time-wasted, besides the cost of war itself, and American lives lost through war. Anyone that says that war is good for an economy is a fool.

There is no quick fix to our dilemma. Every age has an "anti-society" that fights justice in the name of justice. Barbarians are forever at the gates of the city, that is, civilization. Our enemies know our weaknesses, and they have the money, and they have the time, and they will keep chipping away at our culture, our life, our wealth, and our will. Eventually they will knock down the wall that separates us from them, and they will win. I believe that, and it bothers me.

I grumble about the airlines as much as anyone, but it's not their fault, nor is it President Bush's fault, or even Teddy Kennedy's. If there is blame to be placed we must all accept it.

We have lost a common appreciation of the transcendent good, without which there is no common notion of political good, and without that there is a vacuum. I try to remind myself of this truth during election season; if I am right it matters not who is President, or what party holds office. I wish it were not so, but it is.

Novelist Walker Percy identified it correctly, Love is in the Ruins.

I need to stop standing in long lines.
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn / Harvard / 1978: I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.