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This is serious. Really serious. People are going to die. It doesn’t get more serious than this. I’ve been closely following the latest terrorist threats against the United States and I’m with George W. Bush all the way. Sorry to have jumped the good ship “lefty, pinko, communist, terrorist sympathiser, bleeding heart, liberal” but I’m afraid the evidence is in. We now know who we have to be afraid of. Gone is the innocent outlook of youth.
When I was seven or eight my parents bought me a chemistry set. It had test tubes and beakers and little packets of chemicals. It had an instruction book, a recipe book if you like. I remember spending endless hours conducting experiments and mixing the various chemicals to see what would occur. I remember looking through the kitchen cupboards, searching for ingredients the recipe book told me would be there. But I grew out of the chemistry set.
I was nine or ten when I was given a microscope. What a wonder this was. I could go down to the local pond and get water and view little creepy crawlies doing their thing and a load of other really cool stuff. Then I remembered the chemistry set. With my microscope and chemistry set, I could now start to see what happens when you mix things and all the swirling glory they reveal. I could even use the lenses from the microscope to do experiments on the chemicals by concentrating the sun’s rays on them. But I grew tired of this too.
My next big present was an electronics kit. It said boldly on the box that I could do 101 experiments with the wires, knobs, transistors, resisters, capacitors and batteries it contained. I set about building all sorts of things that squawked and squeaked or flashed or beeped. I built a crystal radio receiver and listened to all sorts of wonderful things. Then I remembered. I dug out the trusty chemistry set and microscope and devised ways of using the chemistry set to build batteries that, when exposed to heat of the sun through the microscope lens, powered the electronic set and made things beep and whistle and flash.
Pretty soon after that I got a camera. It was not a sophisticated one like the digital jobs you can buy today. I was not much beyond a box brownie but it worked. It took photos. In keeping with the enthusiasm of all things new, I snapped away at everything I thought was interesting. Family, friends, strangers, buildings, paddocks, airports, factories, cars, trucks. You name it, it got snapped by me at some stage. However, like all things new it too became old hat and I became more conservative in my picture taking.
Then the teenage years hit me and the toys of youth found their resting place on the top shelf of the cupboard.
I discovered very early on in my teenage experience that not all women who were blonde were born that way. I fell in love with blondes at every turn. They were the ones who led you along and then let you down. Always full of mystery and intrigue. I was fascinated with the way hairdressers always got to fondle the hair of these women. Perhaps, I thought, a hairdresser is what I should become. I did like the smell of hairdressing salons. All those chemicals, which did their magic, with their odours mixing with the smell of hair and perfume. What a heady mix. But no. Despite the allure of peroxiding the locks of beautiful women, a hairdresser is not what I was to become.
With the end of schooling came the question, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” To that, I responded. “I will become a fitter and machinist. I will learn the skills of manipulating metal and how to build and repair things. I will find out the secrets of engineering by building the things that other people design and other people want to buy.” And so it was I got my ticket and went off the live the rest of my life. Which brings me to now.
Like I said at the start, I’ve been following the latest terror threat out of London and to tell you the truth, it is serious and I am concerned. No afraid. As I said, I’m with George W. and Tony and John. There is a threat from within. We already have people in our communities who are willing to die a martyr’s death for their cause. However, we don’t need things like face recognition systems in airports to work out who they are. We don’t need racial profiling to determine if they’re a threat and we certainly won’t need genetic testing to determine if they have a terrorist gene. No, these people are very easy to spot.
Next time you’re about to board a plane just look around for a spectacle wearing fifteen year old blonde kid with a British accent wearing high heels carrying a back pack and water bottle and who is reading a John le Carre novel while listening to an iPod. Chances are they’re the terrorist of the future. Why? Because I’m sure that after they have been detained, questioned and subjected to all sorts of nasty things, the police will have found, after raiding their home, a chemical laboratory, books on bomb making, listening and surveillance devices, photographic evidence of reconnaissance missions, engineering tools and materials indicating a highly sophisticated identity camouflage plot.
I think you’ll agree that I’m right in my argument. This is serious. There are people among us who mean to do us great harm. They have no sympathy with folk who disagree with their narrow interpretation of the world and they want to destroy their opponents without mercy. Trouble is, most of these types are the ones who accept as fact scenarios as ludicrous as the one I’ve just made up. This is serious. But not half as serious as the threat posed by the fundamentalists who currently occupy the houses of power and who want us to suspend disbelief and let them get on with the business of ruling.