The terrorists have won. :-(
Osama bin Laden won. Hands down. It wasn't even close.
This is the inescapable conclusion of anyone with a brain after reading the total horror story of Star Simpson, the MIT student who caused a panic at Logan Airport in 2007 simply by wearing some cute flashing lights on heir sweatshirt when she went to pick up her boyfriend.
And most Americans don't even realize it. We think we're strong and safe now. We're "vigilant". Better safe than sorry with people like Ms Simpson. We flattened Iraq because we "thought" they were threatening us. Better safe than sorry, we keep saying.
We created a whole new federal bureaucracy at home -- the Transportation Safety Administration -- to keep us all safe in the skies, the source of all our nightmares on 9/11. They ensure that little old ladies can't take knitting needles on board. They make sure my shoes are off, my laptop out of its bag and in a tray, my CPAP out and in another tray, my liquid carry-ons in a clear plastic baggie, my boarding pass and government-issued photo ID at the ready. If I just had another dozen hands all this would be no sweat. Anything to keep us safe, right?
Wrong. All this security theater certainly doesn't make me feel safer. Paranoia is not vigilance! Every trip to the airport vividly reminds me of my government's utter incompetence. Everything is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. Some loser tries to light an explosive in his shoe, and we get to take our shoes off every time we go through security, in perpetuity. Some more losers concoct some harebrained scheme involving binary liquid explosives that chemists say probably wouldn't even have worked, and now we can't take more than a few ounces of mouthwash through the checkpoint.
A student wears some obviously harmless flashing lights, and she is made to apologize for having scared us because we're too embarrassed to apologize to her, the only one deserving of an apology. A big one. She didn't scare us, we scared ourselves. A rational people would be big enough to admit it.
It's great the TSA has covered a dozen or so of the ways that a truly determined and resourceful terrorist might get through. Certainly any would-be suicide terrorist will now think twice about wearing big flashing lights to advertise themselves. Now there are, oh, only about 988 ways left.
Face it, absolute safety is a chimera and we just look silly trying to achieve it. bin Laden must laugh out loud at each new story that shows just how ridiculously terrified we've all become. Life is full of mundane risks far, far bigger than terrorism, like car wrecks and heart disease, but terrorism gets all the fear and attention.
THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED 'TERRORISM'!!
Throughout his term, George W. Bush repeated his mantra thousands of times: "Terrorist killers...trying to kill Americans for our freedoms..."
Look, George, if bin Laden only wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, he'd just buy a tobacco company or start another fast food franchise. Murder is just his chosen means to his end of making us terrified of our own shadows, to make us see terrorists under every bed, terrorists in our airports, terrorists behind every schoolyard, terrorists terrorists everywhere. He knew our weaknesses, he exploited them masterfully and he succeeded brilliantly, certainly far beyond his wildest expectations. All it cost him were 19 volunteer casualties and maybe $500K in expenses. No military operation in history had ever achieved that kind of leverage.
He wanted us to lose our heads and react without thinking. And react we did -- we launched an aggressive war, tore up the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions Against Torture, and much of the US Bill of Rights. We even gang-tackle harmless young women in airports because of Hollywood's notions of what a bomb must look like (has a real terrorist bomb ever had blinking lights?) bin Laden made us piss in our pants in front of the world. Whatever moral authority and respect we once had through our example is gone, probably for good. Even if we decide to do what's necessary to earn it back -- and we still haven't -- it'll take decades.
bin Laden could never have succeeded without George W Bush. He knew that Bush, like every authoritarian politician, knows that the "fear button" is the surest path to increased power. bin Laden handed Bush a whole pile of power/fear buttons and Bush madly pushed them until his last day in office. A real leader would have seen through all this. He would have insisted that we not become afraid as he quietly and thoughtfully took those few anti-terror measures that actually made sense. The single most important anti-terror measure, by far, is to refuse to be terrified!
Yet most Americans seem blithely unaware of it all. We've lost, and we don't even know it. We still think we're "vigilant". The rest of the world knows better.
This is the inescapable conclusion of anyone with a brain after reading the total horror story of Star Simpson, the MIT student who caused a panic at Logan Airport in 2007 simply by wearing some cute flashing lights on heir sweatshirt when she went to pick up her boyfriend.
And most Americans don't even realize it. We think we're strong and safe now. We're "vigilant". Better safe than sorry with people like Ms Simpson. We flattened Iraq because we "thought" they were threatening us. Better safe than sorry, we keep saying.
We created a whole new federal bureaucracy at home -- the Transportation Safety Administration -- to keep us all safe in the skies, the source of all our nightmares on 9/11. They ensure that little old ladies can't take knitting needles on board. They make sure my shoes are off, my laptop out of its bag and in a tray, my CPAP out and in another tray, my liquid carry-ons in a clear plastic baggie, my boarding pass and government-issued photo ID at the ready. If I just had another dozen hands all this would be no sweat. Anything to keep us safe, right?
Wrong. All this security theater certainly doesn't make me feel safer. Paranoia is not vigilance! Every trip to the airport vividly reminds me of my government's utter incompetence. Everything is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. Some loser tries to light an explosive in his shoe, and we get to take our shoes off every time we go through security, in perpetuity. Some more losers concoct some harebrained scheme involving binary liquid explosives that chemists say probably wouldn't even have worked, and now we can't take more than a few ounces of mouthwash through the checkpoint.
A student wears some obviously harmless flashing lights, and she is made to apologize for having scared us because we're too embarrassed to apologize to her, the only one deserving of an apology. A big one. She didn't scare us, we scared ourselves. A rational people would be big enough to admit it.
It's great the TSA has covered a dozen or so of the ways that a truly determined and resourceful terrorist might get through. Certainly any would-be suicide terrorist will now think twice about wearing big flashing lights to advertise themselves. Now there are, oh, only about 988 ways left.
Face it, absolute safety is a chimera and we just look silly trying to achieve it. bin Laden must laugh out loud at each new story that shows just how ridiculously terrified we've all become. Life is full of mundane risks far, far bigger than terrorism, like car wrecks and heart disease, but terrorism gets all the fear and attention.
THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED 'TERRORISM'!!
Throughout his term, George W. Bush repeated his mantra thousands of times: "Terrorist killers...trying to kill Americans for our freedoms..."
Look, George, if bin Laden only wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, he'd just buy a tobacco company or start another fast food franchise. Murder is just his chosen means to his end of making us terrified of our own shadows, to make us see terrorists under every bed, terrorists in our airports, terrorists behind every schoolyard, terrorists terrorists everywhere. He knew our weaknesses, he exploited them masterfully and he succeeded brilliantly, certainly far beyond his wildest expectations. All it cost him were 19 volunteer casualties and maybe $500K in expenses. No military operation in history had ever achieved that kind of leverage.
He wanted us to lose our heads and react without thinking. And react we did -- we launched an aggressive war, tore up the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions Against Torture, and much of the US Bill of Rights. We even gang-tackle harmless young women in airports because of Hollywood's notions of what a bomb must look like (has a real terrorist bomb ever had blinking lights?) bin Laden made us piss in our pants in front of the world. Whatever moral authority and respect we once had through our example is gone, probably for good. Even if we decide to do what's necessary to earn it back -- and we still haven't -- it'll take decades.
bin Laden could never have succeeded without George W Bush. He knew that Bush, like every authoritarian politician, knows that the "fear button" is the surest path to increased power. bin Laden handed Bush a whole pile of power/fear buttons and Bush madly pushed them until his last day in office. A real leader would have seen through all this. He would have insisted that we not become afraid as he quietly and thoughtfully took those few anti-terror measures that actually made sense. The single most important anti-terror measure, by far, is to refuse to be terrified!
Yet most Americans seem blithely unaware of it all. We've lost, and we don't even know it. We still think we're "vigilant". The rest of the world knows better.