Safe but...

With all the talk of the orange-status Terror alert and placing air marshals on foreign flights coming into the US, and how we're checking more shoes.... how is it that in less than a week, two different bodies have been discovered in the wheel wells of planes coming into New York airports? If these planes were being checked so carefully, wouldn't the wheel wells - an unfortunate, relatively frequent, and usually fatal way people try to get into the US - be checked?

The body found on a JFK plane last night may have been there since Christmas Eve/Day, when it took off in Nigeria. A week - during what's been called the tightest screening process ever.

Now, I doubt any terrorist would choose this route to travel, because he or she would probably want to be alive to reach his/her destination to inflict the terror. But what it says about our security is frightening.

So, too, was the fact that a small plane was allowed to circle around a Manhattan landmark - containing a convicted murderer, btw - for a period of time before the pilot was intercepted (by a helicopter of heavily armed cops - were they going to shoot him at 20,000 feet?).

More frightening is that airplane cargo is still not being aggressively screened. So we can overwork these air marshalls all we like, make as many grandmas as we desire remove their shoes to be frisked, do facial and background scanning all we bloody well please, and yet what lies in the belly of the ship, beneath all those unsuspecting passengers, could yet harbor just about anything.

Now, I'm not a big believer in giving my life over to fear, especially a fear of terrorism. While I still have nightmares and occasionally tears over what occurred on 9-11, I recognize that in the US alone, we lose 12x the number of people to influenza each year than we lost at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in that Pennsylvania field. I've been to New York since the tragedy (it remains one of my favorite places in the world). I have little doubt that tonight's New Year's Eve celebrations will provoke no attack.

What I do fear, however, is the dumb stuff (shoe screening, refusing foreign journalists and scholars entrance into this country, and a wealth of other ignorant processes) we seem willing to do in the name of fear, while refusing to check things like plane cargo and the like. And I find myself suspicious/incredulous of our measures to force foreign airlines to place - and pay themselves - US air marshals onto flights when such a tiny percentage of US-only flights have no such air marshal.

I keep thinking, "What would a single air marshall have been able to do on any one of those three flights on 9-11?" The answer is we don't know.

US Rep Christopher Shaps (R-CT) took flak yesterday for suggesting that people heed the terror warnings and perhaps stay home from places like NY's Time Square tonight. Mayor Bloomberg in NY had a hissy fit - and I can understand his PoV, too. But Shays said something that may need to be said, that there can be no 100% assurance of safety and that if you are actually concerned, you should stay away. We seem to want to place ourselves in bubble wrap and pretend that everything is normal... but as long as conditions exist that are anything but normal... we either need to heed the warnings or insist that our government supply more than bubble wrap and yes, duct tape.

Me? I've got some cheap champagne, some good Vermont cheese and crackers, and plans here with my family and a few friends tonight. I wish everyone safety and sanity. I also hope that we as a country get far smarter in 2004, less afraid to look at the bigger picture in what's causing us to feel so unsafe.