I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired of being gouged by the oil and insurance industries over 9/11 and the War on Terrorism. Every time the terrorist alert color code increases in intensity, my local gas station raises its prices. It doesn’t make any difference that the same gas that was in the ground at 8:00 a.m. is still there at 4:00 p.m., any intervening commentary from Homeland Security, or any other number of so-called experts on the all-news shows, is enough to stampede the oil companies to declare a shortage.

The insurance companies are looking for 100 percent indemnification of any liabilities they might incur as a result of a terrorist attack. Taxpayers have already bailed them out for September 11 losses, but that doesn’t seem to satisfy their corporate greed. The latest insurance scam comes from health insurers. Blue Cross announced it wouldn’t pay claims resulting from terrorist acts such as biological and chemical attacks on civilians. Never mind that they may have rescinded their policy, the very fact that they were thinking about it is enough to raise my blood pressure more than the terrorists ever could. Would a resulting stroke be attributed to a terrorist stress syndrome?

And this isn’t the only gouging going on. Many of us have seen our retirement funds go south with the on-again, off-again impending invasion of Iraq. The stock market won’t budge until there’s a clear indication as to when a war will start and how long it will last.

Alan Greenspan called it right and was taken to the woodshed for a good licking by those who support immediate action with or without the U.N. 

The federal response to a terrorist threat is for every family to prepare a terrorism kit. In his first major action as the new Cabinet Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge went into simplistic detail as to what should be in our kits that was straight out of the “Boy Scout Handbook.” Whatever happened to the idea that combining all 20 or so federal agencies into one would do more to secure our borders and prevent potential terrorists from entering in the first place? Are we to be reduced to a nation of nail-biters, hunkered within our duct-taped bunkers awaiting the phantom menace? What the hell are we paying $350 billion a year to the Defense Department to do, if we’re on our own?

I’m old enough to recall non-color coded terrorist threats during WWII and the Cold War.

School children practiced air raid drills in classrooms. Civil defense agencies were established, recruited and trained volunteers practiced air raid drills. Our whole population, civilians and business people alike, strived to achieve a common purpose. If sacrifice was needed and shortages inevitable, we all shared in the pain. Now it appears that some businesses are all-for-one and not one-for-all when it comes to sharing.

I, for one, breathed a small sigh of relief as Mother Nature provided us with what a disaster looks like during the President’s Day blizzard. Everyone from the Mississippi to the Atlantic was in the same boat and, for once, everyone talked about the weather, even though they couldn’t do anything about it.

Businesses bemoaned the loss of those fantastic holiday sales, as consumers bunkered down in their duct-taped homes and listened to the sound of nature’s fury. There wasn’t a terrorist crazy enough to venture out into the night and the color code dropped a notch while Mr. Ridge waved his arms and told us all to calm down.

Meanwhile, at the epicenter of September 11, New York City’s mayor and citizens took it all in stride and once again set an example for the rest of the nation.