Follow What Leader?

By: Andy Rooney

There is a wish Americans are barely whispering because we don't want to be negative or un-American. We wish our elected and appointed leaders would stop trying to con us and tell us the truth. We have the uneasy feeling we're being told what they think will sound best instead of what's true. They don't seem to trust us to be able to handle bad news - and that's what the news is now - bad.

We're being treated like children heading off to school and being told, "Be careful crossing the street". Has any child in all history been saved from being hit by a car because his or her mother said, "Be careful crossing the street"?

Everyone is trying to comfort us with half-truths. The President, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, speak to us on television. If Thompson and Ridge were pitching against each other in a World Series game, they'd both be taken out and replaced by someone from the bullpen. They aren't good enough.

"Americans are patient people", President Bush said, trying to flatter us into being patient with our campaign against the Taliban. Well, we're all on his side but I have to ask where he's been all his life if he thinks Americans are patient. Why did the guy behind me start blowing his horn the minute the light changed this morning if Americans are so patient? We are not patient people. We are impatient people. We're not happy the way things are being dragged out in Afghanistan. With all our military might bought with hundreds of billions of tax dollars, we can't seem to bring down the renegade government of one tiny, backward country with no real army or air force of its own. We want the Taliban out of there now. We want bin Laden dead or in our hands tomorrow.

We want to know who planned the World Trade Center attack. We want to know who's spreading anthrax. What have all those generals, colonels and majors in the Pentagon been doing all these years? Playing golf with the FBI and CIA, maybe.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, appeared on television with an emergency statement about the "probability" of another terrorist attack. What do you mean, sir? Do you have information we don't have? If you know and they know, why can't the rest of us know? How, where and when are we going to be attacked?

In these terrible days - and they are terrible - it's difficult not to think about the worst that could happen when government officials talk about another attack.

There are three of us in my office - Susan Bieber, Keith Kulin and myself. Susie and Keith live in New Jersey. The defining thing about living in New Jersey, where housing is cheaper, and working in New York, where the pay is better, is the North River, which divides the two states. It's an extension of the Hudson River that runs from the George Washington Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. If you live in New Jersey and work in New York, which hundreds of thousands of people do, you have to go over or under the river twice a day.

There are just three ways to go if you drive. You can come under the river through the Holland Tunnel or the Lincoln Tunnel, or over it on the George Washington Bridge. If a terrorist group wanted to close down New York, it would only have to get a few nuts willing to die and have them drive into the tunnels and over the bridge and explode bombs in the middle of all three. Water would rush into the tunnels and the bridge would fall into the river. End of New York as the center of everything.

I make the drive myself quite often and I don't want Tommy Thompson, Tom Ridge, John Ashcroft or President Bush telling me not to worry when I'm in the middle of the George Washington Bridge.