Monday Morning Musings

Well, I missed posting a book review yesterday. I decided to take most of the day off from anything online, and that felt good. I think we do need to disconnect sometimes. I went out to lunch with my hubby, and then we watched TV shows we'd taped, and I finished the jigsaw puzzle I'd been working on.

I've seen two of the birds, cardinal and bluebird, already this spring.

Last week, Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd wrote about the recent decision by the  Transportation Security Administration to allow small knives and other sharp implements on airplanes. There has been quite a backlash since the decision was announced a few weeks ago, with many people saying it is a dangerous move.

Floyd asks us to look at the decision with reason instead of emotion. We all still have strong emotional reactions to what happened on 9/11, and many people are anxious and fearful when they are flying, worried that their plane could be hijacked the way the terrorists took over the planes that fateful day. Floyd quotes James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic, who has written extensively about flight safety. He contends that "reinforced coskpits and alert passengers make it impossible for a handful of terrorists with small weapons to hijack or crash a plane."

Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot agrees. He has written in his column for the Boston Globe that the 9/11 terrorists plan "relied almost entirely on the element of surprise, not weapons," and that surprise was a one time event." He believes that hijackers will never be able to take over an airplane with small knives again.

Whether or not we agree with those opinions, I think we should agree that we should bring more reason to the discussion, or any discussion, and not always act on an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

And now for a bit of fun. In the comic strip One Big Happy, Ellen, Ruthie's mother, is helping her with homework.

Ellen: "What type of sentence is each of the following - telling or question? Is that a banana?"

Ruthie: "That's easy. It's a question! And a dumb one! What else could it be? An Avacado?"

So what did you do this weekend? Anything more interesting than a jigsaw puzzle?