Sitting at the park with friends and neighbors last night watching our kids play together, we were talking about the arrests of the alleged terrorists in London and what it meant to us individually. Several of the people gathered there travel heavily for their work. For them, they must put aside the fears of terrorism because travel is their livelihood. Instead they focused on the practicality of what the new travel rules will mean for them.
One of them who likes to carry on as everything and check no luggage was upset because he'd have to start checking his luggage. Another was mourning their inability to bring on a bottle of water to drink during the flight. I haven't figured out how to break the news to my kids that grandma will no longer be able to buy them "bath treats" at the airport while she waits for her plane to depart and then give them to the girls when she arrives--as has been her custom (and their delighted expectation) for the past 6-7 years.
While intellectually I know that terrorists in Britain were not hired by Republican operatives to plot this attack at this particular moment in time, I couldn't help but count the days until election and speculate how this international incident would be used for U.S. partisan politics in the next 100 days until the November election.
In an op. ed. piece in the N.Y.Times today one writer was thinking the same thoughts and articulated it very well writing, "Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan."
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