The kind of Christmas we almost had this year should have all of our security people back at work imagining the worst possible tragedies in order to prevent them. On Christmas Eve, as he was entering St. Peter's for Midnight Mass, the pope was assaulted and dragged to the floor. If the assailant had had a weapon the world would today be dealing with a murder that would be considered one of the most shocking in history. Who would believe that one "unbalanced" woman could have done this alone?
About twenty-four hours later a terrorist was able to set off a highly destructive powder on a plane near Detroit with almost 300 on board. If his plan had been completely successful, and with an assassinated pope lying in Rome, Christmas 2009 would be the start of another, and much darker, New Reality. No thanks to bodyguards and airport police two disasters were averted--this time; this kind of luck will not hold.
The security systems we rely on to stay alive and keep our world stable have been proven, in the past few days, to be Wizard of Oz trickery full of special effects and authoritative voices that do not deter the ones determined to hit us. The little dog has pulled back the curtain and we now can see how very vulnerable our sense of daily order and safety is.
1 comment:
All these years of taking our shoes off at Security and it turns out that they should have been checking our underwear.
It is amazingly incompetent.
Maureen Dowd captures it well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/opinion/30dowd.html?_r=1
To be fair, it was Amsterdam that screwed up, not the TSA.
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