Saturday, January 08, 2005
Un-American?
I’m not doing my part.
It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m sitting at Midway Airport in Chicago. I bought into the media hype and was at the airport the duly appointed 2 hours before my flight (I was grateful for this at first…The check-in area was total chaos, but once I finally found the express-advance-ticket-purchase-why no, I’m not checking any luggage-line, it went fairly quickly). Left with a full hour before my flight, I’m denied my usual time-killer: $8 beer in the nearest depressingly quaint airport bar. It’s Sunday, and Chicago’s antiquated liquor laws prohibit the sale of life giving nectars until 11am, at which point I should be happily airborne (Unfortunately the flight to Kansas City is so short that I won’t be able to purchase a cocktail during the flight either, leaving me horribly unprepared for 3 days with my family).
So instead I plug the new laptop into the nearest outlet (Santa was oh, so very good this year), and start up a few games of solitaire. It’s fairly mind numbing, though it lacks the inflated sense of self-worth that I’d get with a nice stiff gin.
Then I realize that I’m sitting a mere two feet from an “unattended package.” Which the chilly overhead announcement lady has already warned me several times about. She is also reminding me that the moving sidewalk is ending every goddamn second, but I will ignore that for the moment. If I can.
An Unattended Package. The grim harbinger of a fragile and threatened America, the ultimate call for constant vigilance, the eerie warning that some godless people actually hate the good ol’ US of A! An Unattended Package!
The packages are thus: One plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag (a grim harbinger of an entirely different horror) filled with remnants of foil and the plastic wrappers from candy bars and possibly cheese sticks. While this may indeed be Al-Queda’s latest achievement in blow-you-to-hell technology, I’m gonna assume it’s the leftovers from somebody’s lunch. A rude somebody…the trash can is right over there…but not a dangerous somebody.
The other item was a small, black nylon bag. Very lumpy. Very suspicious. It was emblazoned with the logo of the infamous “Ad-iddas.”
And it smelled like ass.
I’m guessing somebody got tired of carrying around their gym socks, but I’m hardly an expert.
The issue at hand is…We’re supposed to alert in the presence of suspicious packages in order to protect the nation. And possibly ourselves. But my first thought at seeing a strange black bag is “Oh Christ, if I tell somebody about this, they’re all gonna know it’s just a bag of garbage and stank sweat socks. But they’ll have to follow regulations and get the police to remove it and it’ll take forever and that crap is right next to MY boarding gate so they’ll delay MY flight and then I’ll never get to Kansas City (though if it takes long enough I might get a drink).”
So I didn’t tell anybody.
It should be noted that when I was a wee sma’ child, a building in my town was actually bombed with a “mysterious package.” I’m serious. A bombing in my tiny little hometown (and current destination) in the southeast corner of Kansas. Yes, 20 years ago in Chanute fucking Kansas, an employee’s crazed ex-girlfriend walked into a shoe store, left a paper bag in the corner, and blew the high holy out of the entire 3 story building. Huge fire, absolutely nothing left of the store. Side note: Her boyfriend wasn’t in the store at the time, and no one was killed, but Chanute (pop. 7500) still talks about it. Hell, I still talk about it when I come to town. There’s really not much else that’s happened there in oh, a century.
The government and the media have so over stimulated us with the whole war on terror, that it’s understandable for most of this country’s population to be fairly blasé about this stuff nowadays. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to go to the mall on Halloween. I assume that the white powder on the floor is harmless (Depending on where I’m at. Then I assume it’s expensive). But I know that people really can conceal a bomb in paper bag, and that it really can fuck shit up.
So why didn’t I tell anybody?
I’d like to think it’s because the last people I saw near that area wouldn’t threaten anything except maybe Nichelle Nichols at a Star Trek convention, or the buffet at Sizzler. I’d like to think I didn’t feel it was necessary because it smelled like ass, and really…Who’s ever heard of a bomb that smells that god awful ? You may think you’re gonna die around something that reeking, but it can’t actually hurt you.
But what worries me is thinking that really, all I worried about was making my flight. “Somebody else will take care of it, I don’t want to draw attention to it, I don’t want my flight cancelled or even delayed by 5 damn minutes.” “I don’t want to be involved.” “I don’t want to be inconvenienced.”
“It’s not my problem.”
It doesn’t get more American than that.
(Okay, this post should have actually been posted 2 weeks ago, since it actually was written at the airport on the 26th, but then I forgot about it until just now...so just pretend it's post dated, or some shit.)
It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m sitting at Midway Airport in Chicago. I bought into the media hype and was at the airport the duly appointed 2 hours before my flight (I was grateful for this at first…The check-in area was total chaos, but once I finally found the express-advance-ticket-purchase-why no, I’m not checking any luggage-line, it went fairly quickly). Left with a full hour before my flight, I’m denied my usual time-killer: $8 beer in the nearest depressingly quaint airport bar. It’s Sunday, and Chicago’s antiquated liquor laws prohibit the sale of life giving nectars until 11am, at which point I should be happily airborne (Unfortunately the flight to Kansas City is so short that I won’t be able to purchase a cocktail during the flight either, leaving me horribly unprepared for 3 days with my family).
So instead I plug the new laptop into the nearest outlet (Santa was oh, so very good this year), and start up a few games of solitaire. It’s fairly mind numbing, though it lacks the inflated sense of self-worth that I’d get with a nice stiff gin.
Then I realize that I’m sitting a mere two feet from an “unattended package.” Which the chilly overhead announcement lady has already warned me several times about. She is also reminding me that the moving sidewalk is ending every goddamn second, but I will ignore that for the moment. If I can.
An Unattended Package. The grim harbinger of a fragile and threatened America, the ultimate call for constant vigilance, the eerie warning that some godless people actually hate the good ol’ US of A! An Unattended Package!
The packages are thus: One plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag (a grim harbinger of an entirely different horror) filled with remnants of foil and the plastic wrappers from candy bars and possibly cheese sticks. While this may indeed be Al-Queda’s latest achievement in blow-you-to-hell technology, I’m gonna assume it’s the leftovers from somebody’s lunch. A rude somebody…the trash can is right over there…but not a dangerous somebody.
The other item was a small, black nylon bag. Very lumpy. Very suspicious. It was emblazoned with the logo of the infamous “Ad-iddas.”
And it smelled like ass.
I’m guessing somebody got tired of carrying around their gym socks, but I’m hardly an expert.
The issue at hand is…We’re supposed to alert in the presence of suspicious packages in order to protect the nation. And possibly ourselves. But my first thought at seeing a strange black bag is “Oh Christ, if I tell somebody about this, they’re all gonna know it’s just a bag of garbage and stank sweat socks. But they’ll have to follow regulations and get the police to remove it and it’ll take forever and that crap is right next to MY boarding gate so they’ll delay MY flight and then I’ll never get to Kansas City (though if it takes long enough I might get a drink).”
So I didn’t tell anybody.
It should be noted that when I was a wee sma’ child, a building in my town was actually bombed with a “mysterious package.” I’m serious. A bombing in my tiny little hometown (and current destination) in the southeast corner of Kansas. Yes, 20 years ago in Chanute fucking Kansas, an employee’s crazed ex-girlfriend walked into a shoe store, left a paper bag in the corner, and blew the high holy out of the entire 3 story building. Huge fire, absolutely nothing left of the store. Side note: Her boyfriend wasn’t in the store at the time, and no one was killed, but Chanute (pop. 7500) still talks about it. Hell, I still talk about it when I come to town. There’s really not much else that’s happened there in oh, a century.
The government and the media have so over stimulated us with the whole war on terror, that it’s understandable for most of this country’s population to be fairly blasé about this stuff nowadays. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to go to the mall on Halloween. I assume that the white powder on the floor is harmless (Depending on where I’m at. Then I assume it’s expensive). But I know that people really can conceal a bomb in paper bag, and that it really can fuck shit up.
So why didn’t I tell anybody?
I’d like to think it’s because the last people I saw near that area wouldn’t threaten anything except maybe Nichelle Nichols at a Star Trek convention, or the buffet at Sizzler. I’d like to think I didn’t feel it was necessary because it smelled like ass, and really…Who’s ever heard of a bomb that smells that god awful ? You may think you’re gonna die around something that reeking, but it can’t actually hurt you.
But what worries me is thinking that really, all I worried about was making my flight. “Somebody else will take care of it, I don’t want to draw attention to it, I don’t want my flight cancelled or even delayed by 5 damn minutes.” “I don’t want to be involved.” “I don’t want to be inconvenienced.”
“It’s not my problem.”
It doesn’t get more American than that.
(Okay, this post should have actually been posted 2 weeks ago, since it actually was written at the airport on the 26th, but then I forgot about it until just now...so just pretend it's post dated, or some shit.)
# posted by Karla : 8:07 PM
