So I saw my eldest, Bun, off at the airport today.\u00a0 She’s going on a school trip to Europe.\u00a0 Her first real trip anywhere without a parent.<\/p>\n
I thought “I hope those nineteen f***ing hijackers are burning in the most dismal pit in hell”<\/em> for making it impossible to walk to the gate to see people off anymore – to watch them get on the plane, see ’em taxi out to the runway and lift off and will them safely to their destination through the sheer strength of your own prayers and wishes until they disappeared into the distance, and miles beyond.<\/p>\n Not that she’d want that; she got on the plane with all of her friends – 13 of ’em – so having Dad around would have probably been a buzzkill.\u00a0<\/p>\n So be it.\u00a0 But my libertarian side came under sustained, determined attack by my Dad side when I saw her disappear through the TSA line.\u00a0 “Bring on the sniffing dogs, the intrusive searches, all the scanning and sniffing that a competent security apparatus can do.\u00a0 Hell, let them be competent.\u00a0 Profile everyone getting on back through five generations of anscestry; slap anyone who squawks about it in cuffs; hell, I’ll cover your back and groin-kick any ACLU weenies who show up to bitch at us”.<\/em><\/p>\n “Stuff Bun’s plane with vacationing SAS troopers on their way back from Vegas, and rugby-playing flight attendants and a squad of Air Marshals and a bunch of El Al security guys on the way back to Israel from the International Security-Guys-who-can-smell-gelginite-like-bloodhounds-and-can-rip-arms-out-of-their-sockets Convention – and toss in a few Dutch documentary film-makers for good measure.”\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n “Give them a Sully Sullenberger for a pilot, someone who could make an F-16 sit on a telephone wire and sing Aida back in the day and hasn’t lost a friggin’ thing since then.”<\/em><\/p>\n No, I wasn’t asking too much, and no, it wasn’t easy.<\/p>\n Having lots of “guy time” with Zam will help, of course.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it’s going to be a long twelve days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I saw my eldest, Bun, off at the airport today.\u00a0 She’s going on a school trip to Europe.\u00a0 Her first real trip anywhere without a parent. I thought “I hope those nineteen f***ing hijackers are burning in the most dismal pit in hell” for making it impossible to walk to the gate to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9606"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9608,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9606\/revisions\/9608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}