Monster Spray

When my daughter was about three years old, I had trouble putting her to bed every night. She would cry and beg to stay with me because “the monsters will get me.” She was afraid of “the monsters.” This isn’t uncommon for small children to have these fears. One night, in desperation, I asked her if she remembered when I had used bug spray to kill a bug. When she answered yes, I told her that I had bought some monster spray and it would kill the monsters. I went and got the can of Lysol out from under the kitchen cabinet and I sprayed under her bed, in her closet, and around her windows.

She went to sleep immediately with no problems. I sprayed her room every night for several years before she realized that it killed germs and not monsters.
Sometimes fears are irrational and it is okay to use an irrational solution, but today we are not facing an ungrounded irrational monster in our home. A reasonable parent locks the windows and doors at night, has a burglar alarm or a small Chihuahua to bark and alert them to noises outside. The more dangerous the neighborhood, the more extreme the measures people take to keep themselves and their families safe. Older people frequently have bars on the windows.

The incident with the car bomb in Times Square has once again reminded us that we have monsters living in our home. It isn’t just the extremist Muslim, it can also be an extremist Christian or any other extremist group. It can also be the Mexican drug cartel that has expanded into our country and created such violence in the Mexican border towns.

I commend the veteran who noticed the smoke in the SUV on Times Square and the police who immediately took action to evacuate the area and to prevent the car bomb from exploding. The slogan “if you see something, say something” really paid off in this instance. While the terrorist in this instant did not cross into the country illegally, recent news reports have shown that many people from countries that export terrorism have been caught trying to enter the country through Mexico. The border patrol cannot possibly stop all the people trying to enter the country illegally. The question I ask is how many terrorists have entered the United States with the help of the drug cartel who were not caught by the border patrol?

We live in a dangerous neighborhood and it is time to lock the windows and doors to our country. Monster spray is not enough and our national security is at stake. We need a burglar alarm to let us know when someone with dangerous intent is trying to come in to steal our sense of personal safety, peddle drugs and weapons, and commit murder.