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For generations, philosophers and pilgrims have sought
the secret of eternal life. The answer may lie before us --
and it's neither Dolly nor the Dalai Lama, but any federal
agency, program or policy connected with security.
Once established, these creatures never die, even though
their rationale may have vanished years ago (as with NATO
and the CIA), or never even have existed in the first
place.
For instance, TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky shortly after take-off last July 17, killing 230 people, most of whom seem to have had obnoxious relatives, judging by the next-of-kin I've seen ranting and whining on TV.
Anyway, there were understandable fears that terrorists might have blown up the airplane, and so the federal government increased security at domestic airports. Prospective passengers now need to figure an extra 30 minutes before boarding, and must answer questions about their baggage.
My older daughter, Columbine, traveled some last summer
after the TWA crash, and said it was all pretty silly.
It's like they're expecting me to say, 'Yeah, some
swarthy guy named Achmed wearing a checkered dish towel
over his head offered me $5,000 if we could repack my
luggage for me, and I told him to go right ahead.' Is
American education really so bad that they expect us to be
that stupid? That if you really did take the $5,000, you'd
tell them about it? Or that you'd get on the plane when you
think there might be a bomb in the baggage?
In the eight months since the Flight 800 crash, despite the millions of dollars spent fetching pieces from the floor of the see, there hasn't been a single shred of evidence that points to a bomb in the luggage.
Nonetheless, this useless drill continues at American
airports, and when I checked with the local travel agent,
she said it's even increased. It used to be that you
could have your initials and your last name on your ticket,
like 'J.M. Doe.' Now it's got to be your full name that
matches your ID. They don't examine everybody's ID, but
they do random checks, and if it doesn't match perfectly,
you're out of luck.
I inquired as to when we would need internal passports,
and she said That's probably next.
None of this baggage folderol would have prevented the tragic fate of Flight 800, but for purposes of argument, let's assume it would have.
In that crash, 230 people died. The average life expectancy for Americans is about 75 years (about 13th in the world, even though we spend more than anybody else), so we can presume that the average victim lost half a lifetime -- 37.5 years, for a total of 4,312 years.
Every day, about 1.533 million Americans board airplanes. Each spends an extra 30 minutes to protect against the terrorist bombing that didn't happen, for 766,598 wasted person-hours each day, or 87 person-years -- somewhat more than an average American lifetime wasted each day by these baggage regulations.
Work with the numbers a little further, and it turns out that every 50 days, we effectively waste as many lives as were lost in the crash of Flight 800. In the 249 days since the crash, we've squandered hundreds of lifetimes. If our federal government were truly worried about protecting American lives, instead of make-work look-busy projects that consume American lives, wouldn't it have abolished the baggage checking sometime last August?
And of course, all this baggage-checking would not have prevented the TWA crash, since it clearly did not result from any bomb in the cargo hold.
So why does it persist?
Might as well as why DARE persists. It's supposed to teach kids not to take drugs.
A recent article in The New Republic points out that there's absolutely no evidence that DARE works, other than as an employment program and as a way to get kids to rat on their parents.
Further, it takes time away from real subjects like English, math, history, science and geography. Thus American students' scores in tests of actual knowledge continue to plummet.
When I was in grade school, they told us that the Soviet Union was a horrible place, where the government persuaded children to betray their parents and people could not travel freely, and this could happen to America unless we were vigilant against Communism.
I guess we weren't vigilant enough, or else everybody's been lying about who won the Cold War.
But there's some consolation. We have the secret of eternal life -- for generations hence, Americans will be answering stupid questions about their airline baggage.
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