Since 9/11, travel by air has become extremely unpleasant. One has to arrive up to 3 hours before one’s flight in order to submit to lengthy and intrusive security checks. One has to remove one’s shoes, one’s belt, unpack one’s laptop and phone, throw away perfectly good shampoo or aftershave one has forgotten to remove from one’s toiletry bag, and unfinished water. If one’s various wall-warts and cables look odd on the x-ray, one has to suffer the indignity of having one’s hand luggage unpacked in full view of everyone by someone with a scowl and rubber gloves, upon which they discover a small pocket knife or nail file carelessly left in a pouch and confiscate that too. All this security theatre is designed to keep us safe and alert to the ever-present threat of terrorism. But what is the point of it all when the bloody pilot is a terrorist sympathiser?
If this sort of anxiety makes you ill, you may want to visit your doctor, but then it turns out that your doctor is a terrorist sympathiser too!
Have we learned nothing? Perhaps not. We have to go to school with terrorist sympathisers, we have to go to university with terrorist sympathisers, and of course we have to submit to being taught by terrorist sympathisers as well.
Even the seedy world of the porn star has not escaped someone banging on about their sympathies for terrorists. Nor has the even seedier world of mainstream politics.
Perhaps they’re just passing you in the street.
And, as I wrote yesterday, these aren’t even your run-of-the-mill random car bomb or suicide belt terrorists. These are the most savage and animalistic of all. Did even ISIS sink to beheading babies in their cots?
And the depraved and sick people who cheer this on have been embedded into our society at every level. They’re in our schools and universities, our hospitals and institutions. They sit on our city councils. And – in a perverse irony post 9/11 – they even fly our planes.
Decent people face cheering mobs in our cities and towns thumbing a finger at our grief and at our solidarity as their barbarian comrades make fools of our police. They have made fools of us.
Like our inability to find a coherent strategy to illegal migrants arriving on small boats – at least a strategy that accords with our own sense of virtue – I am not optimistic that we will find a solution for this problem either. And eventually it will be too late.
