The Nation in the Plastic Bubble
Memo- life is dangerous. You, personally, could die at any moment. Somebody once wrote something about the tenuous nature of our existence adding to its meaning. He might have been on to something. In Brave New World, they replace the innate human need for adrenaline with VPS, Violent Passion Surrogate, a virtual danger experience that feeds adrenal lust. In America, we go the other way. I'm thinking that keeping baby formula and water bottles off airplanes ain't that far from Ronnie's Star Wars, in which each and every American could live in his/her own national plastic bubble, protected from life's contigencies and safe to consume and consume again. Wouldn't it be refreshing to do cost/benefit analysis with human lives? You know, we spend a kajillion dollars retrofitting the bridge to save X number of folks who might be killed when the Big One hits, but how many lives might that kajillion save if we poured it into other areas? We spend a kookookajillion on the War on Terror without ever discussing how many dollars we would place on any one American life. $300 billion so far in Iraq to fight them over there, and that would save how many lives over here in health care?

But we're not allowed to place dollar values on people's lives out loud, even though we do it tacitly everyday in policy decisions. It only takes one grieving widow on television to open the coffers and close off reason. We are a lugubrious people in love with a security fantasy, and I can't imagine anybody in power ever saying that out loud. But let's indulge our own fantasy- try to imagine some crusty old gentleman staring into the camera or at his opponent and saying, "Look, I'm not going to talk to you as if you're children. We'll never be completely safe. Ever. But we can intelligently reduce our risks. Let's all take a deep breath and figure out how to do that without bankrupting our future on politically expedient pipe dreams. Let's be adults just this once." Of course, I wouldn't find out the reaction because I would drop dead of a heart attack, but it would be a fine moment. And a good day to die.