Dear Dirty America

With the real unemployment rate hovering between 16 to 20 percent (that includes folks who have given up looking for work and workers who are employed, but are working far fewer hours than they need to make ‘ends meet’), an American citizen might expect the White House to be taking drastic measures to reinvent a crippled economy.According to Robert Reich, there still is no bold jobs initiative from the Obama administration.

Muhammad ud-Deen

Instead, the White House and Washington seems to continually be more interested in chasing wild, plot-like scenarios concerning a toxin that can be derived from castor beans and that could, potentially, be packed into a bomb, carried to the U.S., and detonated in a shopping mall. Or an airport. Or on a train. Or a bus. Or in a movie theater. Or in your backyard.

That toxin is called ricin, and U.S. senior officials are keeping the Obama administration updated on its possible use by Al Qaeda. They are tracking ricin’s every move. Ricin is just another possibility in a world already crowded with possibilities for terrorists. And we’re going to track every threat no matter how likely it is to be used against the freedom-loving United States. And no matter the cost.

There will never be an end to dangerous substances that might be possibly used in terror attacks. Almost anybody can find a way to blow up a mall or release a nerve agent. Is it really worth deploying the majority of our resources in tracking every dangerous, or possibly-some-day-dangerous substance? Here’s the funny thing about ricin:

From the NYTimes:

These officials also note that ricin’s utility as a weapon is limited because the substance loses its potency in dry, sunny conditions, and unlike many nerve agents, it is not easily absorbed through the skin. Yemen is a hot, dry country, posing an additional challenge to militants trying to produce ricin there.

It’s not even a relevant threat! It’s a goddamned farce! Let’s stop tracking a million possible threats. Let’s start a new war on unemployment by offering a serious jobs plan to get the unemployed back to work and instill confidence into the largest group of American consumers — the middle class.

It’s far more dangerous to have millions of people out of work without any reason to hope for the future. America’s best days are ahead, our politicians keep telling us, but it doesn’t take the wisest among us to realize that is bullshit.