Something I feel I want to add after my post earlier today about our fears about plane travel:
I think our personal risk of being blown up in an airplane is being overplayed in ways that are psychically harmful to each of us. To be sure, what we know as American airport security is a dismal spectacle of underpaid and overwhelmed TSA employees and fairy-tale screening "systems" that cry out for improvement. The problem, though, is that we have leaders who find it economically and politically untenable to wage a true battle against terrorism by, say, altering our international commercial, political, and military partnerships that foster the global explosion in selflessly murderous fundamentalists. (Our stubbornly Israeli-leaning policy in the grotesque war over Palestine is one example; our coziness with Saudi Arabia is another; and there are more.) Instead, our leaders treat such consorting as sacrosanct, and therefore try to define terrorism as chiefly a military and security systems problem: We need to attack with smarter force! We need airport screening systems that protect us! We need government agencies that are up to the job! This fanning of one-sided panic is both cruel and dishonest toward those of us who are about to get on planes and who already have plenty of much more threatening personal risks about which to be afraid: what's in the latest envelope from our hardly-reformed health insurance plan (if we even have one); the shaky status of food and drug safety measures long obstructed by industry; our prospects for keeping or landing a job in an economy in which the non-wealthy come dead last in the "recovery." I have no illusions about the horrible things that can happen in the air. I lost a dear friend when an airliner on which she was a passenger was blown out of the sky some years ago. This is human life and death we are talking about, and that is exactly why Washington's cynical game of over-hyping personal fears while neglecting the true global threats to our security is so abhorrent. It's a game with which you and I cannot afford to play along.
I think our personal risk of being blown up in an airplane is being overplayed in ways that are psychically harmful to each of us. To be sure, what we know as American airport security is a dismal spectacle of underpaid and overwhelmed TSA employees and fairy-tale screening "systems" that cry out for improvement. The problem, though, is that we have leaders who find it economically and politically untenable to wage a true battle against terrorism by, say, altering our international commercial, political, and military partnerships that foster the global explosion in selflessly murderous fundamentalists. (Our stubbornly Israeli-leaning policy in the grotesque war over Palestine is one example; our coziness with Saudi Arabia is another; and there are more.) Instead, our leaders treat such consorting as sacrosanct, and therefore try to define terrorism as chiefly a military and security systems problem: We need to attack with smarter force! We need airport screening systems that protect us! We need government agencies that are up to the job! This fanning of one-sided panic is both cruel and dishonest toward those of us who are about to get on planes and who already have plenty of much more threatening personal risks about which to be afraid: what's in the latest envelope from our hardly-reformed health insurance plan (if we even have one); the shaky status of food and drug safety measures long obstructed by industry; our prospects for keeping or landing a job in an economy in which the non-wealthy come dead last in the "recovery." I have no illusions about the horrible things that can happen in the air. I lost a dear friend when an airliner on which she was a passenger was blown out of the sky some years ago. This is human life and death we are talking about, and that is exactly why Washington's cynical game of over-hyping personal fears while neglecting the true global threats to our security is so abhorrent. It's a game with which you and I cannot afford to play along.
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