The Nigerian, DayQuil, and Freedom

Posted by LK on 12/28/09 • Categorized as Blog, Culture War, Featured, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Psychology

I’m flying today. Domestic. Tampa to NYC. The more time that passes, the more serious the attempt to bring down a jumbo jet over a major US city is sounding. It went from a vague report of firecrackers on Xmas day to a full blown terrorist incident by Sunday morning.

I’m not ingesting much if any liquid before or during the flight, because rumor has it that the lavatories will be off limits for the last hour of the flight. This makes no sense to me, nor have any of the usual suspect pundits professed to understand it, and as they’re usually eager to impress with their unique insights, you know we’re all clueless. One can tell the guys with enlarged prostates because they’re discreetly inquiring whether the newsstand/convenience store by the boarding gates carry Depends.

This morning I’m packing, cramming every last item I can into an already overstuffed suitcase. And lying on the floor is a lone DayQuil capsule, bulbous and orange, which I usually carry with me in a compartment of my carry-on bag that’s dedicated to remedies for on-flight maladies.

But not today. Both Quils, Day and Night, vitamin C, aspirin, and even Airborne, which the government spanked for exaggerated claims, share a plastic bag in the checked bag. Hope they like it on the cool side.

Although it’s not clear that my precautions needed to be so drastic/neurotic, the frame of mind that caused said precautions brought up two distinct, although interconnected thoughts:

1. Failed terrorism still succeeds. Behaviors are altered. Procedures are changed. Nerves are frayed. Business as usual requires unusual effort. Smiles and nervous patter are presented along with ID’s and boarding passes to TSA agents.

2. We here is the U.S. are so immersed in freedom, relative to most of the rest of the world, developed and not, that we consider it an imposition on that freedom when even a minor and perhaps meaningless (think DayQuil) intrusion into that freedom occurs.

Without freedom, there’d be no such beast as a terrorist . Just Mad Max chaos, Neanderthal psyches viciously warring over scraps of sustenance. Freedom is the counterpoint that gives definition and distinctness to the ugly melody of terrorism.

As long as men in this flat world believe in Gods with egos (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and will stand for no other deities, our balancing prudent precautions with civil liberties will be, although an imprecise art, a necessary sadness.

So the Nigerian is jailed, the DayQuil isn’t available to keep feverish symptoms at bay, and freedom suffers another glancing, but not fatal blow.