life after 9/11 :: essays research papers

or most of us, airports are the only places where life has really changed since 9/11. The terminal has become a vast business firm of the absurd where aspiring passengers line up halfway back to town. The shoes of little old ladies are gravely removed and inspected. Men in suits prepare their cell phones out of the bag and put their laptop computers into the bagno, wait, cell phones in and computers out. Random passengers stand spread-eagled maculation strangers say to them softly, "Now Im going to order my hands around your waist. Is that all right?" Somewhere unseen, a food-service worker is assembling plastic knives but metal forks in meals headed for first class. And all the while the public-address system hectors us to "report any suspicious activity." Many people, understandably skeptical about these quasi-religious rituals, have stopped flying instead. Others are mentation about moving out of New York and other big cities, and some have done so. These ar e responses more in keeping with the scale and dramatic event of the episode that provoked them, but they may not make any more sense. David G. Myers of Hope College in Holland, Mich., calculated that terrorists would have to hijack 50 planes a year and kill everyone aboard before flying would be more dangerous than driving an equal distance. The steps we have taken to protect ourselves from terrorist act (not counting the military effort to stop it at the source) seem either farcically trivial or farcically excessive. Is there a rational heart and soul ground? Dealing rationally with the risks of terrorism is hard for several reasons. First, human beings are grown at assessing small risks of large catastrophes. And Americans are especially bad at this because we are Americans, and catastrophes are not supposed to happen to us. Our legal culture, our political culture and our media culture all push us toward excessive precaution by guaranteeing that any large disaster will prod uce an orgy of hindsight. Lawyers will sue, politicians will hold hearings, newspapers and newsmagazines will publish overexcited revelations about undercover memos that could be interpreted as having warned of this if held up to the light at a certain angle. Second, the actual risk of being a terror victim is not merely smallit is unknown and unknowable. Economists make a distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty." Risk refers to hard mathematical odds. Uncertainty refers to situations in which the odds are anybodys guess