A Humble Apology

I owe an apology to the good citizens of Bath, Maine, for my violation of city ordinances regarding noise pollution.

You see, yesterday, 11 August 2006, I was driving through town on my way to join the Bath Municipal Band for an outdoor concert. The Bath Municipal Band, bless their hearts, is not going to win any Grammy awards anytime soon. It's a community band, after all. Hardly a pro outfit. But that's not the noise pollution for which I need to apologize. Even though my own playing, which is never what I want it to be, was even further off the mark than usual.

Nor do I need to apologize for the hole in my car's exhaust pipe. I have an appointment next Thursday to get it fixed. I swear. Besides, even now the car's only half as loud as a semi using its engine brakes. Or the shift whistle where they're making the next-generation destroyer-class warships, at the Bath Iron Works. Which is in plain view of anyone riding the city's one bridge over the Kennebec River, carrying the one highway (US Route 1) to Rockland, Boothbay, and the rest of mid-coast Maine. Talk about bullseyes. All you need is a car fitted to lob a couple of rockets into the shipyard and then self-destruct, cutting the bridge. And those jihadists think they're so smart …

No. It was the car radio that was my downfall. For as I was crossing that bridge, I was listening to Marketplace, the excellent nationally-syndicated business-news program from American Public Media. The reporter was discussing security devices at airports. In the wake of the latest "liquid bomb" scare.

How, in the mad rush to beef up security in the wake of 9/11, We the People spent billions of dollars on both obsolete and untested technologies.

How the machines we ran out and bought were never up to the tasks for which they were supposedly designed. How now, with wear and tear, and progress in the arts of mayhem, every last one of them has to be replaced, with the expenditure of more untold billions of dollars.

How such an investment, if made, might stop a terrorist from bombing an airplane, but not a shopping mall. Or a shipyard.

How it would be both safer and cheaper to stop throwing all this money at the useless mirage of safety, and spend it instead addressing the social and economic problems that spawned the terrorism in the first place. A lesson that was, or should have been, obvious to students of guerrilla warfare thousands of years ago.

It is the first time in five years that I have heard this simple and obvious truth baldly stated in the national media. A truth that lodged itself like a truckload of concrete in my soul while the World Trade Center towers were still burning, and has remained, a dead weight, ever since.

The apology is for me, rolling in my Subaru that, with its hole in the exhaust, was pretending to be a chopped Harley. Screaming.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.