Come on folks, just calm down, OK?

Just when I thought it was safe to get out of the bathtub; that the world couldn’t get any more insane now, what with Dick Cheney having been secreted in a rubber room somewhere, and in this country, Stephane Dion having gone back to the monastery, then I learn about this.

A terrorism expert has advised the British Columbia government that a security person should be placed on the crafts of the BC Ferries fleet in order to offset any potential threat. Wow! There’s an item that I suspect brought a chill to the heart of Bin Laden in his cave.

“In the name of Allah, BC Ferries are putting security people on their craft, no doubt taking some of those insanely homicidal mall-cops and reassigning them. This spells the end for Al Qaeda!”

Are these people nuts, or what? Yes they are, and they’re nuts with our money!

But let’s say that some governmental moron (maybe redundant) decides this is a splendid idea. How is it going to work? Are they going to scrutinize every passenger and vehicle that goes aboard? Are they going to use the same officious base-pay high school dropouts that they have to do the screening at airports? I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people and vehicles board those ships every day of the year.

So, maybe such security checks are impracticable. Will they use facial profiling? Since half the former population of the Punjab lives in greater Vancouver, they won’t be able to base their scrutiny on questionable ethnicity like I have seen happen at airports (much to the mortification and resentment of all).

“He looks dusky, Fred. Better stop him. Terrorist if ever I seen one.”

Are they going to look in the trunk of every car? I mean, a guy could drive on with an entire trunkfull of high explosives, then head up to the lounge and prepare to detonate it remotely. “Ve are having the technology. Ve can do this!” Yes, they can. But are they going to? Are the BC Ferries really high on the international terrorism hit list? I choose to think not.

I mean, yes, there are circumstances under which strict security scrutiny is demanded for obvious reasons. Two years ago Wendy and I caught the ‘Eurostar’ train in Brussels in order to take it through the Chunnel to London. At the station in Brussels, there was no fooling around with the security checks. They were highly efficient, never abusive, but absolutely scrupulous. Of course they were. We were going through the Chunnel. What a terrorist target, no doubt.
But BC Ferries. Come on. That’s local ego gone mad. If I board a ferryboat in BC waters I’m more frightened of the idea of crew members who are supposed to be working on the bridge out in some back room screwing rather than tending to matters at hand. Hey, it happened. You can read about it. www.seanbuckley.ca/blog/2006/03/22/bc-ferries-queen-of-the-north-sinks/ -Big boat sank to the bottom of the sea due to a little inappropriately timed hanky-panky.

The whole terrorism thing is an industry. An industry that has asked us to be complicit in seeing our individual liberties eroded due to state-sanctioned paranoia. Yes, 9/11 happened, and it was awful. Yes there were the attacks in the London Underground, and the attack on the train in Spain. All hideous stuff. Lots of hideous stuff in life; it’s a scary business living. An attack could take place right where you are. You could also win $10 million in the lottery. In both cases it’s unlikely.

I lived in the UK at the height of IRA bombings back in the early 1980s. We’d go to London. There were periodic bombings. We’d still go to London. I was in Montreal in the late 1960s. An FLQ bomb blew out a shop a half block down the street from our hotel. Yes, we could have been walking by that shop, and yes we would have been blown to ratshit. But, we weren’t.

The more officialdom takes from us, the more they encroach on our freedom, the more they convey the message that we’re all in Depends due to fear then, in my humble esteem, the terrorists are winning.