I am sitting at the airport waiting for a midnight flight to Boston where I will connect five hours later to a flight to one of the mid-Atlantic airports. Is is not easy flying out of Florida this time of year, especially at the last minute.
Almost one week ago I posted a comment that has become horrifyingly prescient:
Every time you get in your car to go to the grocery store you are in more danger
than getting on an airplane without security screening.
This afternoon I received a phone call from my daughter who was hysterical with grief, telling me that her boyfriend had died in a car accident.
No, he was not going to the grocery store. As a matter of fact, he was on his way to visit my daughter.
A 22 year old man, with his whole life ahead of him, dead.
I never met him. They had only been dating a few months. But happy photos of the two of them were emailed frequently and in her communications with me she spoke of him glowingly. Both recent college graduates, they had been introduced by a mutual friend.
Tomorrow I will meet his parents. What can possibly be said to console them in their agony?
In the US, each year there are approximately 40,000 deaths per year in automobile accidents versus approximately 200 in air transport.
However, life goes on, and politicians will continue to politicize terrorist incidents that can not be fully prevented and the TSA bureaucracy will grow and the rules will become even sillier. We will continue to waste hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent the unpreventable. We will continue to give up our civil liberties to be "safe".
We are NEVER really safe. Let's take steps to stop our politicians from controlling us through fear.