life after 9/11 :: essays research papers

or most of us, airports argon the only places where life has really changed since 9/11. The last(a) has become a vast theater of the absurd where aspiring passengers specify up halfway back to town. The shoes of little old ladies be gravely removed and inspected. Men in suits take their cell phones forth of the bag and put their laptop computers into the bagno, wait, cell phones in and computers out. random passengers stand spread-eagled time strangers say to them softly, "Now Im going to run my reach around your waist. Is that all right?" Somewhere unseen, a food-service worker is accumulation 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, clearly skeptical nigh these quasi-religious rituals, control stopped flying instead. Others are thinking about moving out of New York and other uncollectible cities, and some have done so. These are responses more in tutelage with the scale and drama of the episode that provoked them, but they may non make any more sense. David G. Myers of Hope College in Holland, Mich., calculated that bratists would have to hijack 50 planes a year and kill everyone aboard beforehand flying would be more dangerous than driving an equal distance. The step we have taken to protect ourselves from terrorism (not counting the military movement to stop it at the source) seem either farcically trivial or farcically excessive. Is there a rational middle ground? transaction rationally with the risks of terrorism is hard for several reasons. First, human beings are stinking 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 care by guaranteeing that any large disaster will produce an bacchan alia of hindsight. Lawyers will sue, politicians will hold hearings, newspapers and newsmagazines will publish overexcited revelations about secret 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. disbelief refers to situations in which the odds are anybodys guess