I have been away, and absence always reminds me of how very tiny our world is here on SI, made up as it is of people who follow the news minutely and opine on the most arcane of topics.
ON my return flight, I was sitting next to a nicely dressed woman who turned out to be married to a 777 pilot. She was college educated, well-spoken and intelligent, and we were talking in that casual way you tend to on a trip when she mentioned that she had a liquid confiscated from her carry-on. She had no idea why. When I said something about the Heathrow incident, she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn't KNOW. I was stunned. A pilot's wife! I must have looked aghast, because she proceeded to give me a list of what she does (works, raises kids, etc)and why she doens't have time to follow the news.
In our dissections and analyses we should never forget that this is, at the core, a huge country made up of people who believe in America and who will fight to the death for her if we believe her truly threatened. This includes most of us, right AND left. What we argue here is often just persiflage, important but ultimately not nearly as important as we seem to think it is, and not the definition of us as a people that some believe. To try to define US from either the political garbage we hear, or from what we read on SI is going to be completely misleading imo. |
