As a recent transplant to our nation’s capital I have been scanning the local papers trying to get acquainted with the various sources that will provide my paper news for the next three years. Of course, many people read the Washington Post and I had certainly come across many of their articles in the past, but having recently made it my morning coffee (finally got a coffee maker!) paper of choice I have been very impressed with their consistently thoughtful and compelling articles. Today I read two that have gotten some attention recently and that really stood out as particulary insightful and poignant.

This powerful article put a human touch on my recent class discusions regarding the right to die and specifically the right to refuse life-prolonging medical treatment. We’ve mostly come to terms with this issue but I think it raises an important tangential question as to whether we should allow individuals to make determinations of their own life and death based on the quality of life they have, or would have, as a result of disease. I think we still maintain rather archaic views on the right to physician-assisted suicide, though that is not the point of the article.

This article shook me up in an entirley different way. As a suburbanite Californian – a place relatively untouched by international terrorism – it is difficult to fully grasp the effect of witnessing horrific events. I took a bus across the Potomac the other day and a bit of unconscious fear hit me when I noticed a plane no more than a few hundred yards from the Pentagon decending to land at Ronald Reagan international airport. Dozens of planes do this every day…nobody else even noticed. The Pentagon bears no visible scars from 9/11, business is pretty much as usual (cover-up investigations and spy infiltrations ). A few weeks before I came here the government announced “specific threats” to buildings in DC, Newark and New York, including a building down the street from where I am sitting, but I have never heard the reports mentioned around here with anything other than a sort of prideful stoicism or political cyinicism.

So, to tie this all loosely together, do we want to live in a country where we are guaranteed freedom from terrorism but stripped of the freedoms of the Constitution? To me that is analagous to Chalmers Roberts living in a house with no spouse.