Driving In

Sometimes, my daughter needs to be driven in to school.

Usually, it's because she's been up late the night before, and usually that's because she's been at color guard, which lately has been running from six thirty to ten at night. Twice a week. (Plus 'sectionals', which happens right after school. And Saturday practice, which tends to run about four hours.) Then she comes home, and if she's still got homework to do, she finishes it. Or she tells us she's finished it, actually planning to a) do that in study hall, b) play the odds that she won't get asked for proof of completion, or c) both.

My wife tends to regard having to drive her in as a nuisance, but the truth is that I kind of like it. We listen to the radio, and sometimes we talk about what they've discussed. This morning, the topic was assassins, and assassinations. I didn't catch the entire article, but apparently a massive study of assassins was concluded in which it was found that assassins are not, for the most part, crazy, and not, for the most part, acting on behalf of a political movement. They do tend to have some mental health issues, notably feelings of alienation, inconsequentiality, and depression, and they do occasionally ally themselves with a political point of view, but neither of those are primary factors. To over-simplify it, they're looking for a chance to get instant fame without having to actually do something fame-worthy in the normal course of events, and they conclude that assassination is the way to go. One fellow specifically targeted a sitting vice-president because he learned that no one had ever done that before, so he thought his chances of fame - they might even give me my own chapter in a book -- were greater. This is not the thought process of a crazy person.

So we talked a little about assassins, and about protective societies. I said that I'd hate to be the people who have to take this new knowledge and do something useful with it. I can just see people saying Well, the President's coming to town, we need to lock up all of the crazies, but also all of the disenchanted and alienated. Which sounds funny, but it's not. Used to be, I told her, that the Fourth Amendment pretty seriously protected against unreasonable search and seizure. You couldn't be jailed or even interrogated just because a cop didn't like the style of your hat. But with the terrorists being so prevalent, that amendment, and the definition of what's 'unreasonable', is being stretched a lot. Quite a lot. Check the TSA gropers, for example.

Talking with your daughter. Good stuff.