live free or die- wait, I'm agreeing with Ron Paul?

I am no fan of Ron Paul (or any member of the Paul family, really) and this is perhaps the least eloquent example of a high ranking, publicly elected official I can think of, and yet.... I (oh god, I never thought I'd say this) one hundred percent agree with him. Not the way he expresses it, or the logic he uses in this speech. But the idea. In general for my own logic. Let me explain.


I'm a non-violent Buddhist. The only time I ever feel brought to the brink of violence is actually in the airport. I've been preaching about the experience of flying for quite sometime.  And that's because of the demeaning way in which people are treated.


It makes me not even want to go home next month. It's not worth it even to me, almost, to see my family, knowing I'll be going through this FOUR TIMES (not just when I first get on a plane, but also in my connections in Paris) in ten days. 


Of course, it's in Vegas. And I've heard from various folks that it hasn't been as bad they'd anticipated. But isn't that almost as bad? The anxiety around all of it?


This past week, we were reading and discussing Don DeLillo's Falling Man-- specifically DeLillo's ideas (expressed in several books) of terrorism as kind of performance art. We had a pretty good, fairly long discussion of it. Without getting too in depth, basically, I agree. I wish we could find a way to stop paying attention to them. When we create reactionary policies that demean our citizens and strip away our civil liberties, terrorists don't have to blow anything up to have already won. 


And while terrorists may also want to kill people, what they really want to get at are symbols, ideas. They've done that one way, and that now that we're busy still trying to protect what they hit last time, they've moved on to an even bigger symbol-- our civil liberties. And they've tricked us into doing it for ourselves because we're scared. 


Anyhow, that's how I feel about it. Today is National Opt-Out Day. Which I guess means you have a choice: do I want everyone to see a picture of me naked or do I want to get groped?