I am so sick and tired....

of all this 'terrorist talk', and the underwear bomber, and so on and so forth, and making people into scared little rabbits.

The 'chances' that you meet one, or become a vicitim of one.... are few and far between, believe me. You have a better chance of being in a fatal accident than getting blown up.

I am not being cynical, or making fun.... how could I?... have had my close shaves with danger...

But it does not mean, you end up hiding under the bed forever....

Ok, just to reminisce, here. I was three hundred yards away from where the Israeli wrestling team got killed in 1972. They were very nice, studied them over the summer.

How THAT ended killed something in me.

I could have got blown up at a train station in Italy, if I hadn't decided to come home a day earlier than I had planned. Serendipity.

One terrifying moment was riding the so-called 'murder train' to Athens. I was so dumb, and so fucking naive, I should have been shot, just for that.

I didn't get a visa, beforehand, and got some immense grief at the border.

Somehow I managed, when I yelled at a conductor in Russian, thanks to my Berlitz phrase book....

It was a 4o hour jouney. No food car, you just went on.

And this 'person' got on in Sarajevo. Said he was a 'student' at the university there, studying metallurgy. I'm gullible, lots of people study into their thirties here....

I mentioned I had been in Munich, and he got really really interested. And said, 'I was in Munich ALL SUMMER, last summer.' This guy was so intense, he frightened me to the depth of my heart.

So I went immediately to defualt... 'dumb 'Murkin'. 'Oh yeah, Munich is a nice city....' Dweeb, Idjit.... you do what you can to protect yourself, and most of the fucking train was empty at that point...

And it was known as the 'murder train', not for nothing.

NO person has ever frightented me like that.

We came to the Greek border, and he was watching me so closely... If I had made one false move, I would have been dead.... and oh yes, he was travelling 'home' to Lebanon, where the people from Black September came from, and didn't know fuck for anything about 'metallurgy' and I hope the Israelis fucking KILLED him.

It is so denigrating to play 'dumb 'Murkin', believe me.

When you sense real danger, the adrenalin goes up, and you do what you have to do, and believe me, that guy was dangerous.

So some Greek guys got on and filled the compartment, and I felt like I was 'saved'. Upon which I got seduced for the first time in my life, but that is a whole different story....

I was just so happy to get away from 'that man'.

You can't know....

I wanted to be saved, and I know I was in grave danger.

What can I say, it was an eventful trip....

Later, when I began working here.... there was the Baader-Meinhof gang, terrorists, and they killed a lot of politicians. And the federal police would come in every night and give us photos so we could call if one of them showed up here, because they were afraid they would escape to then-Yugoslavia. Not to mention the Red Brigade in Italy. Oooo, it was skeery... They never saw the guy on the train to know what skeery is, believe me....

This idea I found totally fucked up. But they were certain....

So now comes the other side of the coin. I think I have told this before, but not in this context.... I hadn't been here all too long, and our secretary was a bit hysterical in her nature.

And I didn't know where to place people, or classify them... It was sorta fun.

The Ho-tel was a mess at the time. Most of the rooms didn't have private baths.. they were down the hall, hey. It wasn't unusual...

So these three 'guys' come in and take a triple without a bath, decades apart.

And our secretary goes fucking off the charts. ' Terrarists! Ooooo. And I said, 'Whaa???'

'Have to be, don't fit together... Are you so stoopid?' And I thought 'Whaa????'

So this paragon of civil rights, and protection person, goes and phones in all the info to the po-Lice from the forms they filled out to register, totally aflutter, and certain, CERTAIN, she has some big fish on a hook.

Well... she got them so excited, they checked it all, and said, disappointingly, 'no.... EXCEPT.... They might be sympathisers and helpers.' Uh-huh...

And they were gonna come and take a look at them... discreetly. Uh-huh.

Discreet was having six police cars pulling up in front of the Ho-tel, with sirens blaring, and they stormed upstairs, broke the door open, smashed those poor people up against the wall, frisked them only to find...

They were evangelical pastors. Whereupon my boss went to lunch, and the fucking wrath of Gawwd descended upon me.

Can we talk about egg on our faces, Preciousses?

I am only repeating this here, because of the current climate of 'fear'....

And I don't think I have ever written about the man who made me want to piss my pants for pure fear. I don't like talking or thinking about him, but he haunts my mind to this day, decades later.

What I am trying to express here is differentiating between pure evil, and nut-job hysteria, and I HATE the latter....

So... to get back to the present day... for me... it is about nut-jobs making everyone hysterical. For the most part.

You do not KNOW what it is like, to look into the eyes of pure evil. Dead eyes, like a basilisk.

You do not KNOW how helpless you can feel to be trapped in a nearly empty train, racing through Bosnia to Macedonia, and feel so threatened you fear for your life....

The rest? Pfft. I'd have loved to be a hero. But I would have been dead. Long ago.

That disturbs me, but I THINK he got his just deserts...

I think we have to put this all into some sort of perspective....

There are good and evil people in this world. And the latter do horrible things.... And we can Fight that.... if we stay together.

But I see NO sense in being scared little rabbits who try to hide in their hidey-holes... And I do not see the sense in why the government wants to put band-aids on what they think is wrong and make wounds fester.

We have a world here that hates so much, and the bigger the chasm between income and quality of life is going to be, the worse it will get.

Just my opinion.... but the whole thing makes me sick.