This Is How Terrorism Works

I have a sweet commute. I'm literally less than a mile and half from my job. Some mornings I ride a bike to work (12 minutes) once in a while I can even walk (half an hour); this morning I got out of the house a little late and I decided to drive (5 minutes) and grab a walk around lunch time.

But the traffic was awful. My usual westbound route was too crowded so I drove the other way, hoping to bypass all that mess. I went a couple of blocks east, then a block north, only to discover a complete standstill on the road leading to my work cul-de-sac. What's worse, there were a lot of people on foot. Now there are some serious wildfires about 15 miles west of here, so my assumption was something was burning. 

Since I wasn't moving anyway, I opened the window and asked one of the pedestrians what was going on. "Bombs!" he said. "Road's closed!" I resolved to inch forward to the next turnoff and go home. 

Now this is the interesting part.

You may recall a few weeks back I wrote an extraordinarily stupid tweet. And in response, my favorite nemesis WAMK published my name and work address. So I admit that my first thought when I heard "bomb" was to consider whether I'd brought this on the whole industrial park, and if it would be better if I just kept my mouth shut before someone gets hurt. As it turns out, the bombs (or empty pipes, no details yet) were located really far from my office and it's safe to say that it had nothing to do with me.

Still, when you boil down terrorism, it's about threatening violence so someone who is saying something you don't like will shut up.(If someone goes through with the violence it makes the papers, which means the terrorists have an ally). Threatening is  what I was doing with my tweet, and it's what WAMK did by publishing my work address. And thankfully, no one is going to shut up any time soon. So this time, the terrorists lose. But I gotta tell you, I'm really regretting that tweet right now. Free speech is best left in the hands of adults.