- Toothpaste
- Mouthwash
- A metal, sharp-edged cuticle trimmer
- Metal tweezers
- Now how safe do you feel? (You know, I could gouge an eye out with that cuticle trimmer . . . )
I simultaneously wonder how this happened and for my own selfish reasons, thank God it did. Had I lucked out because I followed a woman from my same flight into the “express/help me I’m running late” line at security? Was it by the good graces of the x-ray technician at security whose knowing look seemed to say, “I can see you’re a slave to your hair products but you look like an honest, hard-working girl so I’m going to let it slide”? Or was it simply fate? I could go on speculating, but that’s not the point. Two things are: 1) I was not meant to miss this flight, and 2) Our government wants you to believe you are not safe in the air.
Which, my own destiny aside, leaves only one real question: From whom are you not safe?
Call me crazy, but you can count me among the 36% of Americans who (according to a Scripps-Howard poll mentioned on page 46 of Time magazine September 11, 2006 special issue) consider it “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that our government officials either allowed the 9/11 attacks to be carried out, or carried out the attacks themselves. Even if those makers of the movie Loose Change 911 didn’t get it 100% right, roughly right is good enough for me. Something is most definitely rotten in Denmark, er, DC.
Maybe you’re thinking it ridiculous that I’m going on about one suitcase slipping through the cracks. But in case it isn’t already obvious, it certainly hasn’t been just one. Certainly not for me. I’ve been flying an average of thirty to forty thousand miles a year on a combination of business and personal trips over the last fifteen years, and for the past five have kept my travel-size scissors and eyebrow tweezers a staple in my cosmetics bag, packed within my single small roll-aboard suitcase which I nearly always carry on rather than check. And that’s just me, married middle-class mom, party of one. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand and you get the picture.
Let me come to the point. Enough is enough, and the only way things will change is with you. Refuse to take off your shoes.
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