Every day on my way to work I worry about terrorism. I ride BART and it seems to me that if terrorists wanted to do something bad, BART would be a great target. It frightens me. This morning I sat down next to a guy who was clearly Middle-Eastern and who was reading a book full of some sort of Middle-Eastern type writing. I know enough to know that I don’t know what language it was. Could have been Arabic, could have been something else. I found myself discreetly scrutinizing this guy trying to figure out if he was wearing a body bomb.

I hold the axis of evil (that would be our President, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld) responsible for my feelings. These fear mongers have turned the world on its head and generated more acts of violence per unit time than the world has seen in years and years – probably since the Vietnam War. The 3 latter guys, are old hands at this game (I don’t know where Bush was – probably blowing coke or something). They played it back when Nixon and Kissinger made some diplomatic progress and ended the cold war. They claimed that Russia had a vast store of nuclear warheads and that we needed to remain hostile and wary. Of course Russia had nothing. The country couldn’t even feed it’s own people, much less launch a war but how do you build a power base against a defenless country? You don’t. You manufacture a problem and teach little kids to duck and cover.

I finally decided this morning to put my book behind my head, close my eyes and relax . If the guy was going to blow up the train then so be it – there was nothing I could do. Of course I didn’t really think he had any bad intentions. He was just a person like me, reading a book on the way to work.

Too bad I have to work so hard to process my surroundings so that I’m not terrified. feh.