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a traveler’s lament

The sun had not yet set on September 11, 2001 when I realized that the salad days of domestic airline travel were over.

Regulations had, of course, been slowly mounting for some time. Some airports had begun to prevent people without tickets from meeting their loved ones at the gate. It had gotten harder and harder to travel with a ticket that was purchased under someone else’s name. And the days of being able to carry a pistol in your carry-on luggage were obviously over, even in Texas.

But on September 10, 2001, Americans wanting to take a quick jaunt to Chicago for the weekend nonetheless faced a process that was, if not ideal, at least largely bearable. Walking through the metal detector was a bit jarring, but if you put your keys in the little bin and remembered to pack your marijuana in a wooden pipe, the experience was quick and painless. Jokes about bombs were of course not welcomed by the security personnel, but neither were they likely to earn you rendition to Pakistan.

But around 4pm on September 11, once the shock had started to fade a bit and I went back to having rational thoughts, I had a vision of an airport in which everyone was more frustrated and unhappy than they used to be, but no one was safer.

To be honest, very little of what I predicted would put me in the same class as Nostradamus. I foresaw a universal ban on box-cutters, but this is hardly evidence of great genius. My anticipation of multiple ID-checks also proved correct, but this as well was really pretty obvious.

All I am really proud of was the general recognition that this incident would wind up feeding the primal American compulsion to take one relatively minor problem and attack it with such a tremendous collection of money, ignorance, and bloody-mindedness that a rational observer can do nothing but sit and cry.

Still, I could never have foreseen how far our nation would follow the blind. Not content to ban toenail clippers and Congressional Medals of Honor, the federal government now demands that its citizens discard all water - the very basis of organic life - before they even reach the gate.

I was recently traveling and decided to bring along a small container of gazpacho, as I have taken do doing on long trips. A one liter container will hold two full, well-balanced meals with no need for refrigeration or utensils. Perfect, no?

As the M60 approached LaGuardia, however, I remembered the recent round of regulations and realized that I would have to stow the soup in my checked luggage, where it would be totally useless to me until I reached my destination. And so it went into the garment-bag next to my toothpaste and safety razor - two other potential implements of mass-murder. The bottle of water I had with me had to be dropped before I even reached the main security checkpoint.

Thus deprived of food, water, and toiletries, I was forced to sit on the floor in an overcrowded terminal as I waited over four hours for my delayed flight to take off. I would have forced myself to buy a $10 McChicken sandwich or $6 pretzel, or one of the other products that passes for food in Airport America, but it was after 9pm and all of the restaurants and bars had closed.

Now, while I certainly don’t want to make my experience sound like the Bataan Death March or something, the fact that such a historical event even crosses my mind when describing a routine plane flight is a sign that something as gone seriously wrong.

But even though I find these restrictions bothersome and ultimately useless, they are not what infuriates me the most. I can pay inflated prices for substandard food. I can pay three dollars for a pint of water. And really, I have never had occasion to clip my toenails on a plane in the first place. But I am put through these aggravations only after a rather extended period of insult and humiliation, and for me that is the real problem.

The bag that I check is opened and rifled through by government contractors. I am asked for my identification so many times I feel like I am trying to cross the border into West Berlin. I am forced by government officials to take off my coat, belt, and shoes in front of proper, respectable ladies - and then to stand there and hurriedly put that clothing back on with my pants falling down. And I am certainly not looking forward to the next round of technology that will run my visual profile through a database, track my movements with RF chips, and then cap it all off by blowing a blast of air into my face.

In the vain pursuit of complete safety we have voluntarily surrendered many of those elements of life which, though individually minor, nonetheless lie at the heart of what it means to be civilized.

When we make a practice of remaining fully clothed in the presence of strangers, we add to our civility. When we pause in our travels to break bread with our companions, when we refuse to accept implicit accusations of malevolent intent, we are reaffirming that we are dignified human beings worthy of respect. And conversely, when we allow ourselves to be stripped of these basic trappings of civilized humanity we agree that in some way, for some period of time, we do not deserve them. And once we agree to that, how surprised can we be when one day we find that these rights are no longer ours to demand?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

a traveler’s lament

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