I'll be heading back up to Boston for the Superbowl in an hour or so. It'll be great to see my friends again, if only for an afternoon, though next weekend we're off for three days of abject debauchery in Montreal.

In this morning's paper, there was an article about a local doctor, how she was giving a speech which must've inflamed someone, since afterwards she came out to the parking lot to find her tires flattened. The local authorities as well as the director of the group on whose behalf she was giving the speech are calling it an act of terrorism. An act meant to inspire terror or warning? Most likely. Terrorism? I think that after September 11th, that term has been tossed around a bit too liberally. Odd that suicide bombers in Israel were labeled just that -- "suicide bombers" -- but not terrorists, while someone poking holes in someone else's tires here in the States is a terrorist. Once our own little bubble of news and awareness here was popped and terrorism suddenly became not just a word heard in the news, but something directly experienced by Americans, we've suddenly gone terrorist-crazy.

I also saw another article talking about how Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, doesn't have enough money or power to fight the Forces of Evil, and that most Democrats support racial profiling here in our own country. It scares me to think that Joe Lieberman, a man who I supported for many years, has come out in favor of going after Saddam Hussein. I wonder how much of this is going to turn out like the McCarthy trials of the '50s, where all we have to do is point a finger at someone and say, "He/she's a terrorist!" and they'll be persecuted. And it also makes me wonder how far this battle against the Forces of Evil will go when we're taking it upon ourselves to go charging around the world to fight all these terrorists. I'm not that much of an isolationist when it comes to politics, especially since I know that it led in part to both of the World Wars, but all we're really doing is reinforcing the belief in other countries' minds that we view ourselves as the Policemen of the World and we firmly believe in Might Makes Right.

While going through my stuff last night, I found my grandfather's dogtags from World War II, which I brought upstairs to give to my mother. She began to tell me about she could probably find her own -- since New Yorkers believed that they were a target during the Cold War and that a nuclear exchange was inevitable, students and most citizens were required to wear government-issued dogtags with identification on them, so that in the case of a nuclear attack, their remains would be able to be identified. It's rather odd that -- at least in our own perception due to our news agencies covering relatively inane American-centric cultural events for the past few years -- in the space of only a few months, we seem to have gone from a relatively peaceful world situation to one where war is conceivable again. Now, we're probably in even more danger given the relative Swiss-Cheeseness of our borders and security, so it would be pretty easy to sneak nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry into our country, or even manufacture it here once the terrorists arrived. Hell, the anthrax that was sent through our mails seems to have been "misplaced" from one of our own Army labs and somehow wound up in the hands of malcontents who sent it first-class to our government. I wonder if we'll be issued dogtags soon.