Terrorists on a Plane: 5 year anniversary

OK, so I couldn't resist the arguably tasteless title of this entry. There are reasons I'm not a politician, and my inability to resists comments like the above is one of them. (This is also a reason for my dearth of friends, but one can also look at it as a litmus tests. My friends all tend to be close ones.)

I was walking by some newspaper vending machines and, of course, many of the headlines address how things have changed in the last 5 years. I'm not planning to read these articles, but let me make a brief stab on what has changed.

This is our generation's Pearl Harbor, so I think it is extremely appropriate to think about these issues. The US had been lulled to sleep, and in principle this was supposed to be our wake up call. In some respects, it has been, but in others it hasn't.

Here are my thoughts at the moment. I'm not trying to be exhaustive.


1. My daily life is the same as it was before.: I am at a conference. I saw lots of talks about nonlinear waves. I have read and sent various e-mails. I have discussed potential collaborations) and gotten some e-mail work done. I have obsessed about various things that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorists, which means that at a very deep level I consider them more important than terrorists or at the very least I feel sufficiently comfortable to live my normal life. The former is in some sense because I wear the red robes. The well-being of my friends and me is much more important to me than the well-being of this country or random innocent people or anything else. This is what I value. (The country is very important, too. I'm just establishing an ordering.) The latter has both good and bad aspects---one should feel comfortable (for sanity, if nothing else) but not too comfortable.

2. Airport security in the US is more stringent than it used to be. My understanding is that we were lagging way behind others in this respect, so improving this is a good thing. (It still needs more improvement. I have had multiple TSA people tell me that I have nice eyes, which is of course what they're supposed to be paying attention to. I have also seen a TSA guy who was going through my bags by hand see my D & D rulebooks and---upon seeing them---discuss that stuff with me while he was going through the rest of the search procedure. So I've gotten through searches faster with both math journals and D & D books. Go me! Clearly, that gives me a considerable amount of nerd cred.)

3. We are fighting an extremely deluded "war on terror." This is perhaps best elucidated here. (I think this version may be slightly different than the one I have on my shirt.)

4. Our President is a fucking idiot. So are most of the rest of our leaders. Some things never change.

5. The U.S. has traded a vacuum for helium. Before we thought they couldn't touch us. Now we're just light-headed. "Splended isolationism" has gone the way of the dinosaurs, and imperialism ought to as well.


OK, so I'm sure there's much more I could write considering what has stayed the same and what hasn't, but this is what's coming to mind this second. My attempt at this entry has just been to write what's occurring to me at the moment. (In fact, I'm sure I missed tons of extremely important points.)

So, while I briefly pause to think about what happened to mark (not commemorate) the anniversary, I think that somehow maintaining a balancing of living a "normal" life (or at least whatever I have that amounts to it) and occasion pausing to recall important events I experienced in some level (and I remember very well what and how I was feeling that day) is the right way of going about things. And for me, that includes making comments that others might consider tasteless. (That is who I am and I'm not going to sacrifice that just because a subject might be considered taboo.) I will admit, however, to worrying just a little bit when Tim of all people seemed to blanched at my intention of being somewhat tasteless with this particular entry.