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Six months and one day ago, as the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center towers still burned, we heard many
statements to the effect that This changes everything.
Nothing will be the same.
The main change has come at airports, and since I seldom fly, I probably wouldn't have noticed anyway. Every air trip I can remember has involved standing in interminable lines and getting treated, not as a paying customer, but like a suspect.
The idea was apparently to make you relieved to finally get on the plane, packed and uncomfortable though it might have been, and then have this suffocating and claustrophobic environment just sit there for a while without any explanation as to why the published schedule had lost all meaning. Then it would move a few hundred feet, followed by another mysterious delay as you wondered whether there was a contortionist school you could attend, so as to learn how to fit into a coach seat.
Eventually it took off; the delays were probably arranged so that you'd get plenty of exercise trying to catch your connecting flight, whose gate was always at the other end of the terminal.
And now even a nail clipper is contraband -- not all
that long ago, didn't we make jokes about I'm sorry I'm
writing this letter with a crayon, but they won't allow any
sharp objects in the place I'm staying.
All this screening seems pointless because on Sept. 11, only minutes elapsed before it became impossible to hijack an airplane with box cutters and a bomb threat.
The north World Trade Center tower was hit at 6:45 a.m. Mountain Time, the south tower at 7:03 a.m., and the Pentagon at 7:43 a.m. By that time, the passengers on United Air Lines Flight 93 knew what was going on, thanks to cell phones.
After a vote and a shout of Let's roll,
they
thwarted the terrorists and kept the jet from hitting the
Capitol or the White House. It crashed at 8:10 a.m. in
Somerset County, Pa., killing all 44 people aboard: 32
regular passengers, five hijackers, five attendants and two
pilots.
Much has been made of the heroism of New York firefighters that day, and they deserve such respect. But firefighters are paid to do risky work, and they know that when they hire on.
The passengers of Flight 93 were just normal citizens flying from Newark to San Francisco, and yet they met the occasion. After that, no terrorist could plan on using pocket cutlery to convert an airliner into a human-guided bomb.
So the issue was solved that day by citizens acting on their own without any new government security programs, but that isn't the modern American way. Nothing really changed.
In the days after Sept. 11, as I kept hearing how we were now in a different world, I speculated about how that might become true.
America would be going to war in mountainous Afghanistan, so soldiers would need to be trained to operate at high altitudes. They might need to rebuild Camp Hale, a few miles from Leadville on the west side of Tennessee Pass. A year-round military payroll certainly wouldn't hurt a seasonal tourist economy, and in the process of rebuilding, they'd find and remove all the unexploded ordnance left from 60 years ago, thus making America a safer place.
Plus, our Tennessee Pass railroad line would go back
into service. Indeed, in this everything has
changed
environment, passenger rail service would be
deemed worthy of the $15 billion subsidy that went instead
to the airlines.
After all, a hijacker could conceivably get control of a train, but what's he going do with it? He can't aim it at a building. Thus, no need for all this screening, and Americans could travel in dignity and comfort, rather than by air.
Further, in this everything has changed
scenario,
the United States would get serious about cutting off the
funding to nations that support and abide the terrorists
who hate us.
A fair amount of our petroleum comes from the Middle East, from countries like Saudi Arabia where the rulers finance schools that teach the glories of jihad, or like Kuwait where, despite the expenditure of American blood and treasure a decade ago to liberate the place from Iraq, about a third of the population approves of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
We'd see ads on TV which branded the drivers of gas-guzzlers as threats to the national security because they helped finance our enemies. We would build good mass-transit systems as a matter of national security, along with useful pedestrian and bicycle trails.
Those are some of the things that might have happened if
it had indeed been true that everything changed
after Sept. 11. But all I've really noticed on the
domestic front is a government engaged in more meddling,
while subsidizing big business -- that is, pretty much the
usual course of affairs.
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