Bomb Threat... and forgotten memories.

"Your vehicle insurance has expired, and we have tried to contact you multiple times.  This will be our third and final call to allow you to take advantage of our special offer," the recorded voice on my phone said to me.

"If you wish to speak to a customer service representative, press 1."

"1."

I hate these calls, and there is no reason that I should be receiving it on my government issued phone.  So Friday morning, I pressed "1" and snarled into the phone.  "You have called the US Federal Government, and I want to know why you are calling this phone."

A deeply accented male voice responded with a similar snarl.  "Who the f** are you?  What is YOUR name?"

"This is James Lawton with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and you have NO reason to call a government phone."

"Are you familiar with 9-11?  Osama bin Laden was one of us.  And the World Trade Center?  We did that.  Osama is my brother, and we are all coming for you.

"Your US Army is filled with sleeper cells, and we are going to rise up against you."

After quite a bit of vivid description of how I had engaged in fellatio with a number of folk, some of whom are related to me, the guy suggested some improbable physical acts, and then he left me with a statement.  "Tomorrow, we will be bombing a Marine Corps base in New Jersey."

And he hung up.

During the call, I walked out of my office into the hall, where a co-worker shushed me - there were meetings taking place in rooms all up and down the corridor.  But when she heard the tenor of the conversation, her eyes grew wide.

By the time the caller hung up, I was shaking, I was so mad.

Yeah, the call was not coming from a 601 number.

I talked it over, first with a couple of co-workers, and then with the security guy (who had done the exact same thing I did, and had an identical conversation, right down to the fellatio suggestion). He said that there was nothing in the message that identified it as a credible threat.  There was nothing specific mentioned, nothing that indicated that I had been chosen to communicate a genuine threat.  No declaration against projects of the Corps, no locations that meant anything to me.

The caller was, he explained, a member of a group in the Middle East who call up cell phones with the intent to harass.

All the same, all day Saturday, I was watching for something to happen in New Jersey.  It was no consolation that Saturday's attack happened in Pittsburgh, or that it was a white guy that did it.  All the same, I breathed a little easier when the day passed without 'my' incident happening.

There was a crazy thing, though.  For years, my sister Caroline and I have had recurring conversations about neural pathways, about how you form new memories and learn new things.  And specifically, how you can use existing neural pathways to access memories.

While I was relating the story to a co-worker on Friday, suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up.  I was suddenly reliving a memory of a previous call, received years ago, also made to my government cell phone.  The phone call in New Orleans had been almost exactly the same as the one Friday, except it closed with a non-credible threat against my wife rather than an unspecified military base.

My wife.

Once I remembered the incident, I remembered other pieces.  A memory of absolutely losing my mind.  I have a fragment of a memory of me screaming incoherently into the phone - in my office - about the actions that I was going to take to track the man down, to dismember his body, and to stomp individual pieces of his body to pieces of meat, indistinguishable from the dust with which his blood was going to mingle.  Another scrap of memory of spittle flying from my mouth as I turned purple with absolute rage.  A memory of trying to track down the source of the call, with no success.  (Cloning and spoofing cell phones was a pretty novel concept at that point.)

Before I started describing Friday's call, I HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EARLIER CALL. My brain had tucked that particular bit of information down a disused neural pathway, and did not let me have access.  I have never understood how people could sublimate traumatic experiences, and what their brains would do to hide the memory of emotional and physical pain.  But my brain had done exactly that.  Only by relating Friday's experience did I get a chance to re-experience the fury and fear associated with a threat on my wife.

The threat against Kathe was no more credible than the threat against the Marine Base in Jersey.  And I knew that.  But it played on the same fear - the fear of an attack on something I hold dear.

Nobody can threaten me with things that I don't care about.  Threaten me with extra taxes on balut?  That might affect me once, if that.  Threaten to destroy old copies of Ranger Rick?  Huh.  I'm a little nostalgic on that one, but OK. 

But threaten my family, and the game changes entirely.

I hate the fact that this happens.  I hate that I lost control.  And I have no idea what we - as good people - are supposed to do to address the problems that result in such hate.

I wold love to think that this call is the modern equivalent of "Is your refrigerator running?  Well, you'd better run and catch it."  or "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?  Well, you better let him out!"

But it is not.  It is much deeper than that.  It is the result of extreme tribalism - where we humans (all of us!) break people into 'us' and 'them'.  And that dichotomy makes me sad.

I suspect that love is the only answer - loving my enemies, blessing them that curse me, doing good to them that hate me, and praying for them which despitefully use me. For if I love them which love me, what is my reward?  Everybody does that.

But it is a dilemma.  I also feel protective of my tribe.  My people. And my mind works overtime when I feel y'all are in danger.

Go love some people, y'all.  

John Philip Sousa March

Last week was spent in class in Washington, DC.  The class is run by Georgetown's Government Affairs Institute, and it provides people from the Executive branch with a chance to understand the legislative process.  Lecturers included a congressman, several staffers, a political historian, a few journalists, lobbyists... - all people who have a unique perspective on what is happening within the beltway.

Every lecture was amazing.  The lectures showed us why things work the way they do, why the don't work when they don't, and what the reasoning was behind making it function (?) that way.  It was like high school civics class by people for whom that is their passion.  I geeked out all week long.  I could not drink the coffee fast enough to keep my brain up with all of the connections they were offering.

The one thing that surprised me was an unspoken theme of the entire class.  Every single person who spoke provided us with insight into the people who make our government run, and all of them talked about the same thing without ever saying the word.

Patriotism.

Turns out that the whole sausage-making process that comprises our government runs on patriotism.

These lecturers were not 'pie-in-the-sky' innocents nor are they ignorant of what is truly going on in Washington.  They are battle-hardened veterans of burrocratic and legislative conflicts.  They know what is failing in the system, and they are horrified by some of the things that they see.

But they see those things, and roll up their sleeves.  And, even more importantly, they see that same quality in the people around them.

I asked questions throughout the class (surprised?), but all of my real questions were some variant of  'Is there cause for optimism?'

I am worried about the country.  I worry that we are getting farther and farther away from being able to talk about things, be it police brutality, or gay rights, racial issues, or guns.  And I fear that when we stop talking, we start fighting.  And escalating.

So my question, couched in all of the best classroom language, was one that comes from my core.  Is there reason for hope?

The immediate reaction was, Of Course Not.  The precipice on which we dangle is unlike any we have seen.  We are talking less and are angrier than ever.  Even those who are so inclined, find it difficult to work together.  One of my favorite stories was of a couple of senators who worked together to get a compromised piece of legislation together.  In the end, one senator was going to be facing some really rough going as a result of working with the opposite side, and the way they got around the problem was to call each other names in the press.  That rotten so-and-so, unwilling to compromise, I can't work with him, he is the worst of what his party represents.  We got this legislation done DESPITE him, rather than because of his influence.

And it worked.  The representative got re-elected.  The legislation got passed.

The system is horribly broken, the lecturers all said.  And yet,