Issac Bailey | Remember all our freedoms

While we were paying attention to other things, a woman in Yemen took a bomb hidden inside a printer cartridge to a UPS office to be shipped to an address in Chicago.

Another homemade bomb buried inside a Hewlett Packard desktop printer was shipped through FedEx. Both bombs made their way in transit through multiple countries before U.S. and other intelligence officials were tipped off about their presence before they could do any harm.

Officials suspect the bombs were the work of Yemeni-based terrorists who may have wanted to detonate them while the planes carrying them were still in the air.

It's easy, particularly this time of year, to forget that we are all in this together, and especially on a day like today, which may seem like Christmas, with some of us feeling as though Santa has granted our every wish and others feeling as if our only present was a big bag of sticks.

A day like today should be taken as another victory for our way of life.

A woman I frequently battle with on my blog about a variety of issues once told me that we shouldn't take for granted this country's long history of peacefully transferring power.

In a world in which genocide and forced military takeovers are rampant, we shouldn't forget how blessed we are to not have to suffer through that kind of upheaval, even if our own brand of rhetoric can seem outsized, outlandish and overdone at times, or even most of the time.

That privilege was put on display again this week and will be again in two years and two years after that and two years thereafter.

It's a privilege we all enjoy and can decide to participate in or ignore. Either way, it won't change the reality of its existence.

It's a privilege that those Yemeni terrorists are still plotting, with increasingly more sophisticated plans, to spoil, to take away, to render useless with bombs and the threat of bombs and deaths and the threat of deaths.

It's why after the dust clears - and why voters did what they did is over-analyzed - we must not forget who the real "us" and "them" are.

Schedule alert:

I will be speaking at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Waccamaw library in Pawleys Island as part of a series of public appearances to discuss difficult-to-deal-with topics.

The title: "An Evening With Issac Bailey: When It's OK to Use the N-Word and Other Related Issues."

Another discussion is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Nov. 10 at the Temple Shalom in Conway.