Here’s what I was thinking about the other day while stuffing all of my toiletries of three ounces or less into a quart-sized plastic bag today. Maybe 9/11 wasn’t the end all be all for Jihad on Americans and the western world, but it sure affected a large amount of the population. We might have the idea of Jihad all wrong—sure, maybe there is celebration amongst the Taliban or Al Qaeda or {Insert Latest Media Label Here} when they hit us on a massive, one-time attack, but they have won a huge psychological victory for years to come.
I have lost time and sanity since 9/11. I now have to plan out my packing ritual a little more when travelling. Ok—I’m staying a week—I have to take shampoo, but is this little container going to be enough? Is my expensive perfume going to weigh in at a whopping 3.1 oz, resulting in me having to trash it? Will I have to treat athlete’s foot from the airport security line when I get home? And now I have to add an extra hour each way so I can get eye-raped by a million dollar xray machine that I will walk through and get patted down after anyway. Tack a mark on the terrorist’s scoreboard—now we are all so scared of some crazy asshole blowing up his underwear that millions of people are losing a shit load of time that we’ll never get back wasting in fear of a minute possibility of one of these idiots made it aboard.
Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate making it safely home on my flight. But I don’t appreciate having to get violated every time I fly somewhere from that day on. Here’s the thing Fox/CNN/MSNBC/etc.—you are not helping anybody except the manufactures of xanax by freaking us all out. I think Al Qaeda had a large load of stock in Hefty and needed to figure out a way to sell more plastic bags. They succeeded.