ALIENABLE RIGHTS

Have you noticed we scarcely require imported terrorists to assassinate us? While a small army of airport myrmidons deprive 80-year-old women of their shoes and poke their fingers into potentially explosive chocolates, our neighbors may be mass murderers. There are enough homicidal lunatics in this country that al-Qaeda would be smart simply to hire them as contractors and forget infiltration.

Evidenced by recent news one is jeopardized in schools, churches, courtrooms, farmhomes, offices - you name it. None of our citizens has contrived a way to annihilate thousands of us simultaneously, but they have scored in the hundreds, and it's a matter of time until one breaks into the big time.

Thomas Jefferson numbered among our inalienable rights life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I wonder what he would think of their evolution. More and more, life is at the whim of vicious psychotics, liberty is constrained by misdirected measures to thwart foreign terrorists, and try pursuing happiness when a berserk citizen has consigned a loved one to a premature casket.

Government is such a ubiquitous octopus that a person can’t turn around without running afoul of its tentacles. Government or another agency should formulate ways to restore to us what has gone alienable.

Floundering here, we stridently advocate rights the Constitution never recognized while Jefferson’s ideal evaporates. In “Death of a Salesman” Willy Loman shouts, “The woods are on fire!” They’re on fire here and now, and means must be found to quench the conflagration.