Rick Steves (the travel host featured on PBS) said the single most intelligent thing I’ve heard since 9/11 when asked this question:
Flying used to be part of the fun of traveling pre 9/11.
Rick Steves:
I don’t think that has anything to do with 9/11. It’s just an aggressive kind of economic environment where airlines make more money by offering less niceties, and people just want to see it as a bus ride with wings, you know? I don’t want food when I’m flying, and I don’t care if I’m stuck in a line for 20 minutes. If I land safely on the day I hope to I think it’s been a wonderful success. I’m a little odd that way. To me, 9/11 is just a big media thing in our country, and we’ve just got to get a grip and get over it and move on. Thirty thousand airplanes take off and land safely everyday in our country. Twelve million Americans go to Europe every year, and 12 million Americans come back. Every month on the streets of our cities 1,000 people are gunned down by people with handguns. Until terrorism gets anywhere near that category, I’m not going to think twice about it.
I wish I’d said that, or could even expand on it. But Rick Steves says it all. What’s going on in airline travel these days has little to do with 9/11, and everything to do with corporate greed, and our complicit part in accepting it.
And 9/11? A terrifying act to be sure, and we played right into the terrorist’s hands afterwards. We’re fighting wars that didn’t need to be fought, and the life and treasure that we are throwing away because of it far exceeds anything anything the twisted minds behind 9/11 could’ve hoped for.
Right here the heartland, my Indiana home, we slaughter more people every 3 years on the highways with our automobiles than died in 9/11. I’m no gun control nut, but every 5 years in Indiana as many people die by guns as died in 9/11.
I’m at much more risk from my fellow Hoosiers than I am from radical Islam. We’ve lost our way, friends and neighbors.
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