The War On Liquids

by Mark P. Shea - January 11, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

In early August 2006, the Global War on Terror reached a new and disturbing phase, when it was discovered that Terror has now recruited certain liquids as deadly new allies in its bloodthirsty campaign to wipe out our freedom. As this dramatically heightened threat shows, Terror knows no bounds in its resourceful ability to find allegiances in the world of inanimate objects.

It began with the covert recruitment of a few rogue airplanes to the side of Terror on 9/11. This was an understandable strategy, given the long involvement of aircraft in many forms of warfare and violence. Likewise, it was no surprise when box-cutters (by nature, brutal implements and easily tempted to wickedness) allied themselves with Terror to such a degree that it was necessary not only to completely ban them from air travel, but to ban its weaker and easily seduced cousins – including nail files and clippers, can openers, and crochet needles – from the skies as well.

For a time, all seemed calm. But then disturbing reports began to flow in with increasing frequency. Shoes – so long a part of our childhood strolls and nursery rhymes – suddenly revealed that they too were poisoned with hatred of our freedom and imbued with a deadly and inexplicable will to kill. One shoe very nearly succeeded in blowing up a plane mid-flight. Further restrictions and scanning procedures brought this new threat to heel and made shoes toe the line, but this new arch-enemy also forced us to examine our souls and ask: What other ties with Terror were out there?

When a 2006 investigation by Scotland Yard made abundantly clear that liquids have gone over to the side of Terror as well, a trembling and confused populace naturally began to ask, "Can it be very long before solids and gases follow?" Indeed, in the jumble of bad news that trailed the revelations of that fateful discovery, we already have news that numerous other inanimate objects, such as cell phones, juice containers, baby-food jars, and sports-drink bottles have chosen to ally themselves with Terror as the enemies of Freedom.

For six years, our rock-solid philosophy has been (like the War on Aviation that followed Pearl Harbor) a clear-eyed recognition of just what the enemy is: Terror. Accordingly, as long as there is Terror anywhere in the world, the United States is committed 100 percent to war with it, for as long as it takes. And that commitment must perforce extend to making war on the friends and enablers of Terror. Of course, this is going to require some transformation of American society if we are to win this thing. It's going to require a New Way of Thinking for a New Kind of War.

Happily, the government of the United States has led the world in confronting this problem, with impressive results. For instance, since 9/11, experts in transportation safety and security have been puzzling out the question that dominates everyone's mind, as an ever-swelling array of innocuous-seeming inanimate objects turn against us in their perverse love of Terror: Why do they hate us? If only we could understand what drives liquids, cell phones, sports drinks, shoes, box cutters, and laptops to this will to kill. If only we could fathom how it is they unfailingly seem to target completely innocent young men of North African and Central Asian extraction with absolutely nothing in common and, in some kind of parasitic strategy, use these unwitting men as tools in their plots to destroy us!

Until the day dawns when this mystery is solved, however, we must simply soldier on, ever-vigilant as we guard ourselves against more and ever more inanimate objects and their great mastermind, Terror itself. And as we engage in this never-ending war against Terror, we must remember that any one of us could be the next to blow up a plane in mid-air. Now that Liquids are on the side of Evil, a simple glass of water absorbed into the bloodstream could make anybody – a Korean nun, an 80-year-old Lutheran lady from Lake Wobegon, a small child, anybody – into a crazed killer. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can direct our efforts into being afraid of Everything. And that, friends, is why every person who flies must be targeted and screened as equally suspect without any partiality or the intrusion of so-called "common sense."

For if we do not fear Everything, then Terror will already have won.

Mark P. Shea is a senior editor at www.CatholicExchange.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic. Visit his blog at www.markshea.blogspot.com.