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September 11. I can think of nothing that's affected travelers for the worse since the last World War. We now travel with fear, paranoia, and bureaucracy. Taking a flight abroad isn't quite the act of resistance it was six years ago, but we still question our neighbors who are off to the Arab nations about their sanity, we still eye our fellow travelers with suspicion, we feel the weight or our recent history every time we step through a security gate at an airport. Here are a few reads that acknowledge the recent anniversary of the day that everything changed.
How Travelers Have Changed
Remember after 9/11 when people were so worried about being harmed in a terrorist attack overseas that they were choosing trips that, in fact, increased their risk . . . of a lousy vacation? They were, for instance, choosing cruises that sailed out of Florida instead of sightseeing trips to Europe...
Over the succeeding years, however, the T.S.A. has become an arrogant bureaucracy that appears to care little about our rights. Americans who book airline tickets are treated like terrorists until the T.S.A. can prove us innocent.
TSA head Kip Hawley echoes many travelers’ sentiments when he jokingly concedes in one enlightening interview that “screening ideas are indeed thought up by the Office for Annoying Air Travelers and vetted through the Directorate for Confusion and Complexity.”
When I think of travel now, I think of how long it will take me to go through security, how long will I have to wait at Passport control, and how delayed my flight be.
Travel Since 9/11 on Via Magazine
Think about it. Since 9/11 planes have not been falling like raindrops from the sky, cruise ships have not been exploding, trains have not been getting derailed by saboteurs—yet we fear that all these things could start happening tomorrow.
I know it is now part of the job, but I know what it represents - that every one of us who works at an airport is deemed to be potentially dangerous and untrustworthy. Of course, if one thought about it that way too often it could really cause one grief.
The End of America: Naomi Wolf onThe Huffington Post
The Bush administration created a policy post-9/11 about liquids and air travel. Increased security restrictions led to airport security guards forcing some passengers to ingest liquids: A Long Island mother, for instance, was forced to drink from three bottles filled with her own breast milk prior to boarding a plane at JFK. Other adult passengers have been forced to drink baby formula.
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I was never afraid to fly before 9/11. I never enjoyed it - an irony not lost on me - but I was never afraid. Now, when I stand in the terminal before boarding my long haul flights, I cast my eyes around at my fellow passengers and wonder if there is someone there that is going to try to kill me. It breaks my heart to admit this, but it is a thing that is true. I don't know if the travelers-as-criminals policies will ever be relaxed enough to allow me to forget this way of thinking or if time will leave me thinking that it has always been this way, that I have always been afraid, that I could never see Kabul, that my fellow travelers were not friends I hadn't met yet, but something more sinister.
I can not personally speak to the loss of lives on 9/11. My New York friends were all accounted for, thankfully. And I can not plumb the depth of sadness for those who were not so lucky. I can say that every year on 9/11 I hear again an imaginary noise in the back of my head, the sound of the planet getting smaller, the sound of the gates slamming on places that are no longer available to me. Six years on, the redrawing of travelers maps in to places that are supposedly, fictionally "safe" and "not safe" resonates with me as though it happened yesterday. I do not want to forget, but not an anniversary goes by that I do not hope for the reversal of the results of this unspeakable tragedy.
Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View. She wrote to President Bush before boarding a plane in the fall of 2001. He did not respond.
