HOSTAGE TAKING RIGHT HERE AT HOME

We live in a terror-filled world where hostage-taking has become a dangerous way of life. From our city ghettos to our ships at sea to foreign capitols. But take no comfort in the old it-won't-happen-to-me instinct. Frankly it's happening all around you all the time....!

In the latest example, North Korea captures two American journalists, and imprisons them. Everyone knows the rules of the game. Two young girls snared as hostage-pawns in a heartless game of international power-chess. Assuming Kim Jong and Obama play their knights and rooks properly, both nations will grudgingly compromise something, and then both girls will be released with each side claiming victory.

But consider how many less-newsmking times each of us is likewise snared as hostages-pawns.

If you live in a neighborhood with gangs, you live in daily fear that the punks will prevail, because the punks have more weapons and ways at their disposal than the good guys. And so as hostages to their juvenile ruthlessness, your life becomes a daily game of dangerous chess.

If you shop in a supermarket there's another hostage game going on. Less violent, more subtle. But you are a hostage just the same. It's those agonizing, toe-squinging minutes you are forced to wait in the checkout line where you are water-boarded with a flood of garish frontcovers from America's popular magazinery. From Oprah's face offering you the wisdom of the ages...to Rachel Ray grinning at you with bubbly new recipies...to the National Enquirer (and its neurotic off spring) assaulting your sense with a photographic gush of bini-bodies, flabby butts, posing starlets, and telescopic lens shots of rehabbing celebs waving from their window to the gasping paparazzi.

I can't speak for those two poor girls, but I can speak for my weekly confrontation with this desecration of the First Amendment along magazine row. History tells us the girls will eventually be free. That same history tells me that those of us in checkout counters will never ever be free. Unless, that is, we start our own farms....!