Playing Russian Roulette with American's Emotions

by patricia ernest

September 11, 2001, proved to us that the gun was cocked and at least one chamber was loaded with a bullet.  We saw the explosion.  Most American's didn't even realize that there was a gun let alone that it was loaded and aimed at us.  But after that awful day we became aware of the game, the gun and the danger.  We became afraid.  Someone was playing a game with us, and the results proved to be deadly.  This is a game we didn't even know we were playing, and most of us don't want to continue playing, but we get no say in this.  To this day, a gun is being held to our heads, the chambers spin and the trigger clicks.  We never know what the next result will be, only what has happed in the past.  The question is what to do.  The answer is that as long as we're forced to play the game, we play the game.

For almost three years the Department of Homeland Security has been clicking the trigger each time they have raised the security code from yellow to orange.  So far the firing chamber has been empty.  But the dread and fear is that we don't know about the next one.  Most American's believe that as long as that security color code remains in effect, we will never see it reduced to green.  In order to take the threat level down to green, the president would have to pronounce that there were no longer any groups of people desiring to do harm to massive numbers of Americans.  He would have to prove the chambers were all void of bullets.  If that should happen, all our anxiety would go away, and we would no longer be forced to play the deadly game.  There would be no game.

With the repeated sound of the whirling chambers and the clicking trigger of threat alerts, Americans are forced to wait to see if there is another bullet.  We know there was one, but is there another?  The government says there will be another and the next click might produce a loud bang.  No wonder Americans remain uneasy and fearful.  We know it happened once, and the government is telling us that the game continues, so perhaps it could happen again.  They tell us that our odds of most chambers being empty are better today than they were almost three years ago, but they can't tell us how good those odds are.  As long as they cannot assure us all that all the cambers are empty, we remain anxiety-ridden participants in the game.  It isn't as though we can reject playing the game, because we do not hold the gun.  Our government holds the gun, clicks the trigger, and we must wait to see if the firing chamber contains another bullet like the one that exploded on September 11, 2001.  The anxiety that began that day continues right up to this very day.  As long as the gun is pointed at our head, and as long as the trigger is pulled by the changing alerts, we are forced to play this awful, dreaded, deadly game.

If this administration were not so secretive, perhaps we could trust them at least a bit.  But due to their shielding us from the facts and the rules of the game, we have had to guess what is happening.  Thus, we have come to be called "conspiracy theorists".  We have not been able to rely on shared facts by our government, so we have to try to figure out the rules for ourselves.  We have to play detective, and we do it exactly as a good detective would.  We take what we know and try to contemplate how the crime could have happened.  We come up with all the possibilities that would have led to the crime that was committed.  Since we have no help from our government, we must take the crime and work backwards.   Detectives aren't conspiracy theorists they are simply trying to lay out all the possibilities and come up with a reasonable supposition that would produce a solution to fit the facts.  Until we are told all the facts, we are left with only our own suppositions.  We are trying to discern why the bullet was in the chamber, when it was loaded there, who loaded it, and why it was fired.  The most important question of all is whether there is another bullet in another chamber.  Until we can answer those questions or until someone we can trust answers those questions for us, we will continue to be forced to play Russian Roulette.  And, each time the government clicks that trigger, we will flinch.  We flinch because we just don't know the rules of this game that we never wanted to play, and we don't know the odds of another bullet being in another chamber.