In a celebrity-obsessed society, I guess it can be easy to think somebody has left the television on. When you’re on a plane, train or just walking down a street people are everywhere, looking straight ahead into a haze. The attention span is as long as a five-second station identification break. It’s as if God has a wide screen and everybody wants to veg out. Not much of the outside surroundings are getting through.
Hey, I’ll admit I slouched into bad vision habits, too. I was doing so well after 9/11, casing out every section of the world I stepped into. But complacency brews during safe and secure times. However, my eyes finally showed signs of reconditioning the night before the London subway bombings. It was after a Chicago White Sox game, and I was riding on the elevated train. The vision is as clear today as it was then. Two rows in front of me to the left were a couple of young men carrying backpacks. One looked a little suspicious, so I locked in on his face. Both got off a couple of stops later. There was no incident, and maybe there wasn’t one planned. Then terror struck overseas, and when the description of the murderers was revealed my experience seemed eerily similar.
It was interesting to see how the rest of the U.S. reacted. Random searches were conducted on subways, buses, ferries and commuter rails in New York City. Even in Montana security teams were meeting to assess the risk in the state.
If anything, the reaction reinforced this country’s long-standing tradition of waiting for the worst to happen.
As for prevention, there appears to be not an ounce of it anywhere at the federal level. What did the Senate do in response to the London tragedy? It voted THREE times to block increased funding for transit security and approved a bill that reduced the blanket by $50 million compared with what is being spent this year. Don’t bother looking to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for help, either. In a press conference one week after 50 Brits were brutally killed, Michael Chertoff talked like a kid in an FAO Schwartz. The little stuff didn’t matter; only the big ones caught his attention.
“The truth of the matter is, a fully loaded airplane with jet fuel has the capacity to kill 3,000 people,” he told the Associated Press. “A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people. When you start to think about your priorities, you’re going to think about making sure you don’t have a catastrophic thing first.”
I could take his statement in so many directions, but Chertoff did such a fine job buzz sawing his reputation I think I’ll just let the humiliation fall where it may. Oh, he later clarified his stance on the matter after offending the masses, stating, “We have an equal responsibility to protect Americans across the board.”
So here we are, three months removed from the panic, and I’m willing to bet the random searches in NYC have dropped and tension under the big sky in Montana has eased. Everything is quiet, and that screams danger. We’re in the middle of the fall season, and fittingly it seems the federal government’s idea of a terrorism safety manual is the TV Guide.
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