Opinion: Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too.
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This is an opinion page, and we feel honor-bound to render an opinion on today’s finest news story: Grandmother X-Rays baby at LAX.
Some possibilities:
Stop the epidemic of stupid grandmothers! It’s time for Gov. Schwarzenegger to get serious about grannies so out to lunch you can’t even trust them not to put a baby through a radiation machine. Or maybe the real message here is that abuela was smarter than the panicky government authorities. See next opinion:
You hear the most outrageous lies about radiation. Take a bow, J. Frank Parnell. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the baby received only 20 percent of the radiation dose you received last time you flew New York to L.A. For that we may say:
Excellent work, TSA! An alert screenwatcher ‘immediately noticed the outline of a baby and pulled the bin backward on the conveyor belt,’ so ignore the talking head later in the story who rhetorically asks ‘if a baby can get through...’ The baby didn’t get through. Nice try, though, in spinning this story as one of the horrors understaffing produced, Transportation Security Administration flack Nico Melendez. And while you’re at it get some Spanish speakers at these gates. In fact:
This should be standard procedure at our airports! With such low radiation doses, why not give a break to a tired old woman who’d rather just walk through the gate and let her baggage take a ride? Shame on the ‘security officals and paramedics’ who forced her to send the baby to a hospital.
OK, these are all pretty weak opinions. I’ll try one more and then call it quits:
America’s callin’ Pat Paulsen: Every weird news item has its perigee of weirdness, and this one’s comes here:
In the several seconds the baby spent in the machine, the doctor added, he was exposed to as much radiation as he would naturally get from cosmic rays — or high energy from outer space — in a day.
Solar flares, delta radiation, cosmic rays: Isn’t it bad enough that stuff exists out in the vacuum? Do we have to deal with it on earth too? As presidential candidate Pat Paulsen said during his campaign: It’s time to stop sticking our bayonets into each other and start sticking them into space.
OK, there’s no opinion to be rendered on this matter.