How are YOU going to live YOUR life?

I read this comment by Tata this morning in response to my post about how Republican voters seem to be perfectly willing to live their lives in a constant state of piss-in-yer-pants fear that Islamic terrorists are going to suicide bomb their homes or schools at the same time as those who DO live in target areas go about their business.

Then I started thinking about why it was that I shlepped down the Garden State Parkway Tuesday night to obtain a signed copy of Lisa's story: The Other Shoe -- "Funky Winkerbean" cartoonist Tom Batiuk's compendium of strips dealing with the Lisa Moore character's two battles with breast cancer. (videos here.) It isn't that I'm such a big comics geek. Sure, I read them every day, but I'm not like some of the people who were in line with me waiting to get their books signed who wondered what the 10-year jump in "Funky" would do to "Crankshaft", where Ed Crankshaft's granddaughter is dating "Mooch" from "Funky." (Do you have all this straight? Good...because there WILL be a quiz.) But I shlepped down there to get a book I didn't even particularly want, and all this after writing an obituary two weeks ago for a fictional character drawn in pen and ink.

And then I realized why "Lisa's Story" is so compelling -- because the storyline showed that the decision to stop chemotherapy that isn't doing anything other than compromising the quality of life one has less can be as empowering, if not more so, than continuing. I think many of us hope and wish that if we were stricken, we could approach our illness with the same realism, but not fatalism, as "Lisa" did -- and as Elizabeth Edwards continues to do in real life (though so far her story is going far better).

Every day we begin taking risks the minute we get out of bed in the morning. That egg may give us coronary disease. The hormones in the milk may give us cancer. The carpet is giving off fumes. The water we made the coffee with has PCBs. We could get broadsided at a red light and be killed on our way to work. And that's just before 9 AM. But you don't see millions of Americans demanding that their food supply be safe, or that their water be clean, or that bad drivers be removed from the road, or that their air be clean.

And yet, there is a subset of American voters that demands guarantees that terrorists will never, ever come here and attack this country again -- and they don't seem to want efforts that actually work; they're content with tough talk. They don't care that the TSA asked passengers in San Diego to try to smuggle fake bombs on planes. They don't care that U.S. port cargo remains uninspected. And they don't ask why, after six years, Osama Bin Laden is still out there, making videos that conveniently surface every time the Administration wants to give the American people another Fear Injection. As long as Rudy tucks them in at night, just as George W. Bush has for the past six years, and tells them that he won't let the bogeyman come and get them, they'll sleep like babies -- despite the fact that Rudy didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the terrorism risk prior to 9/11, not even after the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993. As long as Dexter reassures the terrified little Cody that the Bay Harbor Butcher won't get him, the fact that Dexter IS the Bay Harbor Butcher doesn't matter.

It's appalling that the very same people still putting those ribbon magnets on their SUVs that they drive in as armor against auto accidents -- the ones that say "Land of the free, home of the brave" -- are neither free nor brave. Nor do they care to be free or brave. They are perfectly willing to live lives of quiet desperation, never once forgetting the Scary Brown Men that are surely watching and waiting to get them.

And when the next attack occurs on U.S. soil -- and it will, given that the Administration is about to take the next step in ensuring that everyone in the world hates our guts in preparing to attack Iran -- these people will be willing to give up even more of their freedom and become even less brave. And when their time comes to leave this plane of reality, they will ask themselves, "What did I do with the time I had?" And no matter how hard they try to kid themselves, the fact that they spent it in fear instead of enjoying the time they had will haunt them as they exit.