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An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security. What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall.
An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security. What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall.
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- Nick Joaquín
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