Everyday Life

We at the Blasphemy Blog have just come back from lunch at the White House, and it was an exciting event. All right, we were just sitting at the chess tables in the park in front of the White House, but it was still exciting, because we got evacuated.

Halfway through the lunch, security personnel with guns began sweeping the park, telling everyone to leave, and many, many reporters began streaming out of the White House grounds and across the street with us.

But it turns out to have been no big deal. It was just a small plane accidentally flying into the No-Fly Zone around the District of Columbia. They let us back in after less than ten minutes.

Such is life in our nation’s capital, where this sort of thing happens fairly regularly. Everyone takes it seriously when it happens, but it can no longer be considered anything less than routine. The old woman who sleeps in front of the White House next to her anti-nuclear weapons display now just has a bicycle so she can ride away quickly if she ever has to. Everyone in the nation’s capital is like that woman: going about their business, with only minor alterations.

It makes sense that it should be this way. After all, the markets are open in Baghdad, and Somalia has a thriving telecommunications industry. Foreign companies line up to do business in the Sudan, of all places. There are grave risks, but people calculate the risk, and they move on. Who can really say, in this day and age, whether Mogadishu is safer than the District of Columbia? In some ways, it probably is, in other ways, it isn’t.

This is all just to say that we’re glad it was nothing. We’re glad it was just some pilot with a broken radio. We wish that everyone everywhere could have the relief of knowing it was just a pilot with a broken radio. We want all life everywhere to go on for reasons other than that it apparently has no other choice.