An Autumn Chill in the Air

Fall brings on a drier, more existentially honest air here in the Northeast, the kind that braces you every morning, and you have to brace yourself against it. This last weekend before Thanksgiving is one of those periods it seems, where everyone is busying themselves with some distraction or another but the air is crisp and cold enough to make you know that autumn is just a transitional period, not a state where one can long linger no matter how pleasant or tempting that prospect may seem.

We all have to get ready for the approach of winter and share to some degree relief that comes from the harvest, as metaphorical or as real as such reaping may be for any, for all. There is a bleak time soon to come -- as it has always come – and will pass away again into the mists of memory. How we get there, the story we tell ourselves along the way, well, those are the things that go to make up a life, aren’t they?

How we do that getting ready work ranges from packing a suitcase to checking over the pantry or making sure those high thread count sheets kept put away for guests are close at hand. This year, there’s a new question – depending on how new you think such questions really are; that is, “Do I go through the naked machine or let the security guard feel me up?” First of all, I haven’t flown in years and years, so my personal stake in the riveting, burning question on so many minds is quite minimal. For that, I’m thankful.

The answer, however, is harder to come by. If the scanners work as poorly as some recent reports indicate, then the people most benefiting from their installation are the people who sold them to the airports. On the other hand, if running one’s hands (hands paid a starting wage somewhere in the range of $8.50 an hour) up and down a 75-year old man’s inseams can deter a jihadi with nothing left to lose, then we should have been frisking old folks and scanning little children years ago. This is not to say there should be no screening in airports at all, only some common sense applied to who gets what kind of treatment. Also, it is well worth pointing out that no suspected hijackers/bombers have been caught on planes originating from Israel, a country that uses some pretty sophisticated behavioral profiling along with an up-to-date, realistic “ok-to-fly” list to catch a potential criminal before there’s any serious damage done.

So we have these choices to make, and none of them satisfy our particularly American tendency to want to be left entirely alone, to be though of as innocent before proven guilty and all that kind of tripe. The Israeli example is worth noting, and maybe even emulating, if it would cut out some of the whining hysteria about perverts Photoshopping and getting all excited over scanned images or guys getting ready to punch out female TSA agents for touching their mothers inappropriately.

But the profiling, you say. How can we allow this presumption of guilt to hang over all of us, the great majority of whom have done nothing criminal (at least nothing involving a plane, a bomb or any combination of the two that particular day)? Fact is, New Yorkers allow more useless profiling via stop-and frisk on the streets and other approved and intrusive methods of law enforcement within the five boroughs than the informed citizenry of most other cities around the world, and nobody’s really crying too much about civil liberties infringements. The difference is that Israelis and other nationals who have had to make real choices about how much privacy and comfort to give up in exchange for the chimerical notion of security went ahead and made the choices and are living with them.

When a guy tries to smuggle a bomb into the country lined in his underwear, we cried out for scanners that could see underneath the clothes. It seems more than a few companies were lined up and ready to take Homeland Security money and airline money that was magically available in these times of deficit and cutback, seemingly set aside just for this series of upgrades. If the pattern holds, cavity searches are inevitable.

There is no one, easy answer to the problem of making air travel as secure as we believed it to be before September 11th. That’s just a fact, and one we’ll have to live with as we get on with the business of speeding through our calendars to stop every so often at the milestones and markers we set for ourselves so that we remember and perhaps more importantly, truly reflect, on why we are alive in the first place. Answering those big questions will remain a task for each of us, each in his way responsible for the answers we come to and how they come to life through our policy prescriptions, rules and regulations and even the way we think about the question.

As an autumn chill in the air settles in over the city and this seaboard, I can only hope that each and every one of you has the grace provided by a moment to reflect on those things for which you are mindful, as awareness is maybe that most essential first step toward that admirable state of mind we call being thankful.

End. Rev4. 21 November 2010, 3.45 p.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer