Safety

Here's a word that's been tossed around a lot the last few days, mostly in the form of a yes/no question. A yes/no question is about the most useless way to probe for information in our culture, right up there with the alien anal probe.

"Are we safer now than we were five years ago?"

Yeah. I can't answer that with a yes or a no. Maybe? Sometimes?

By virtue of about 10,000 changes in the way I get on an airplane, I'm safer than I was five years ago when I fly.

However, I'm still not completely safe. "Safe" to me, would mean that any exterior threat to my safety was removed. We are never "safe."

Being Safer, at this point, requires real imagination.

We've locked the cockpit doors, not just anyone can wander into the airport concourse, we're all more alert to danger, and most recently, our toothpaste has been banned from the cabin.

And that's just the airport. Given the fact that the airport is one of the few places I can not only feel secure, but sense security. I'd venture to say--if required to answer a yes/no question--no. We're not safer than we were five years ago.

I get queasy when I drive by unguarded water filtration facilities that serve major cities like Atlanta or Savannah.

In Savannah, down by the river, boats pour goods in from around the world. Not a lot of security or screening there either.

Lonely border patrols, illegal immigrants, and "patriots" converge in the sparse desert in frightful night scenes. Shadows slip through.

Men of Middle Eastern descent film their children on a roller coaster in an amusement park and I profile them in my mind.

Dark figures, wisps in rocky darkness, willing to die in order to kill. We don't know their names, we don't understand their motivation...and they don't line up in trenches and tanks as targets for us to shoot down.

The targets, I'm afraid, remain on our backs.