On a Sunday morning I’m catching Malaysia Airlines flight MH091 from Newark to Dubai, and eventually onward to Kuala Lumpur. Newark, now cloyingly recast as Liberty International Airport, is forever the same old bowl of concrete and cars. In a cheerless restaurant in Terminal B I’m eating breakfast beneath framed pictures of sandwiches when the Malaysia crew comes promenading past, headed for their Boeing 777 at the end of the concourse — the pilots in sharply cut, military-style suits, the stewards in green tuxedoes, the girls in sarong-style dresses of melon and teal.
At the surrounding tables are the rest of Flight 91′s eventual occupants, and present company excluded it’s a substantially… let’s just say Eastern-looking lot — A mix of Arab and Malay and Indian, with a liberal distribution of skullcaps and prayer beads, and a handful of women in full black burqa right down to the gloves. It’s all very glammy and international here in decidedly working class Newark. I like it, even if it’s probably a disconcerting sight for the throngs headed to Detroit and Charlotte, with enough dark skin and beards to keep many Americans away from airports forever and hunkered down in their xenophobic hidey-holes. And while I hate saying it, something tells me MH091 gives a thrice-weekly dose of the willies to the already edgy screeners down at security…
After standing in queue for fifteen minutes I approach the metal detectors, where a screener greets me good morning. She is wearing paramilitary-style uniform complete with shoulder braids, combat boots and a beret. Across her back it says SECURITY in heavy gold lettering. This is supposed to look and feel like the ordered confidence you’d encounter in Europe or Asia. But the too-sharp creases in the pantlegs, the snapping gum and the glossy lipstick, all expose the phoniness and desperation of the scene. These aren’t even the trappings of a third world state — something you’d see at the airport in Quito or Entebbe. They’re a carnival imitation of those places, with uniforms straight from an old Monty Python wardrobe.
A fork, part of my normal carry-on inventory for years, is confiscated from my luggage. In a few days that fork, along with thousands of other expropriated bits of metal, will be hauled off in a sealed bin by the local fire department. Reminded that forks are still dispensed with inflight meals, the screener replies tersely, “That’s what they want us to do.”
Nearby a National Guardsman is flirting with a group of teenagers. Troopers are cracking jokes, bags are toppling from the belt. “Take your shoes off please.” I’m ashamed and embarrassed. Is this the new world of flying?
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Our zero-tolerance policy toward the carriage of weapons — perceived or real — has turned the predeparture process into a pageant of humiliation. Airports have become scrap-metal repositories, while thousands of people are asked to remove their shoes because one man, on one occasion, had the idea of concealing explosives in his sneakers. At the risk of sounding flip, are strip-searches to follow? After all, even the stupidest terrorist will see that sneakers are out, and what more fiendish than a bomb in your underwear?
I’ve heard people recount, “I was not allowed to carry through my coffee without tasting it first. But what if I’d simply filled my shampoo bottle full of gasoline?” The ironies and examples are endless: A shattered wine bottle is just as sharp as a boxcutter; a shiv of snapped-off plastic no less lethal than a knife. And so forth.
The preoccupation with Weapons of Mass Distraction gets back to a stubborn fixation with the September 11th template, assuming any sequel is bound to unfurl around a do-it-yourself arsenal similar to that used by the original 19 skyjackers. Terrorists, the intercepted messages and payrolled tipsters inform us, are again targeting airliners. But while I don’t know exactly what an al-Qaida operative might have in store, I’m skeptical of one thing, which is the likelihood of another suicide skyjacking. The skyjack model, it’s critical to note, is forever changed, as never again will anybody believe a purloined plane is headed to Havana, Beirut, or anywhere but into the side of a building. I can’t imagine anybody making it two steps up the aisle, to say nothing of into the cockpit, with less than a bucket of pinless grenades balanced on his head.
If anything, the ongoing nonsense underscores our vulnerability by flaunting our refusal to behave rationally. One is reminded of the movie “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film about a totalitarian state under constant barrage of terrorist bombings, brought to the brink of collapse and hilarity by its own foolish, hyperextended authority. Just imagine a platoon of firefighters carting away a locked container of forks, tweezers and hobby knives.
In an atmosphere charged with trauma, we’ve come to view security as a phenomenon of pure cause-and-effect. We’re like children in the school playground, who in recounting some lurid tale from the TV news or eavesdropping on some grievous grownup discussion, usually get the facts right but miss the point entirely, failing to scrutinize our opponents’ wider intents and purposes. We construe every event, be it mundane or serious, as some glaring weakness in our already overstressed system, outrage erupting every time the next nail file, Popsicle stick, or rubber nose and sunglasses is found lurking in a seat pocket. Even the act of snapping a photograph from a concourse window might earn you a chat with a policeman, a policy that smacks of Iron Curtained Moscow or Bucharest. The cry is always to bolt more doors, deny more access and concoct more high-tech gadgetry.
I’m unsure which would be the better quotation to drop here, Franklin’s famous bit about sacrificing liberty for safety, or maybe something more ornery from HL Mencken. Whichever old sage would be more appalled by the goings on, we’re more than happy to empty our pockets, rat out our neighbors, pull down our pants. Enough of us, at least, to keep the beast fed and happy. This is what we want: if it equates to safer flying, or more accurately the perception of it, by all means, yes, x-ray my Nikes and take my nailclippers. The TV cameras and newspapers have quoted us time and time again, acquiescing with a sigh: “Well, it sucks, but if it makes flying safer I’m all for it.”
But what if it doesn’t?
Neither all the determination in the world, nor the most sweeping regulations we dare codify, will outsmart a cunning enough saboteur. Preferring a path of lesser resistance, terrorists will fight along a moveable and eternally porous front. Even our leaders admit this, yet over and over, even as we languish in security lines to have our luggage and dignity eviscerated, we give in to the notion that just about anything, no matter how illogical, inconvenient or unreasonable, is justified in the name of safety.
As airplane nuts in junior high school, my friends and I spent virtually every weekend roaming the terminals of Boston’s Logan International Airport. I came to know that airport as one learns the way from bedroom to bathroom at 4 a.m. Being kids on the verge of our teens, much of our time there was spent engrossed in pranks and unauthorized snooping. Logan became an amusement park of dastardly challenges. We sauntered through metal detectors, rode carousels through baggage rooms, crawled through hatchways and sneaked into stairwells. At one point we knew the doorway codes to several secure areas.
Our most cherished activity, though, was gaining access to the airplanes themselves. We’d stake out the gate of an arriving flight, then ask an exiting agent or crewmember if we could take a peek at the cockpit. Cordial captains would give us tours, inside and out, of our favorite planes. On some occasions we were told to go ahead, unsupervised, often by the captain himself. “Just don’t monkey around with anything.” Or, more daringly, we’d simply stroll down the enclosure and step aboard.
Once, as seventh graders, two friends and I spent more than an hour in the cockpit of a Northwest DC-10, utterly unbeknownst to anyone besides ourselves. A mechanic came aboard for a check and found us in the pilots’ chairs, seatbelts on, pretending to be airborne over the ocean somewhere. This was the late 1970s. The threat of terrorism, mind you, was not some nascent fear in the backs of people’s minds.
Looking back at my forays at Logan, was security dysfunctional, begging for acts of sabotage? No, not really. In essence it’s no different than today. Isn’t flying safer than it used to be? Probably, but it was never particularly dangerous to begin with — not thirty years ago, and not the day Mohammed Atta and his henchmen walked aboard with a stash of knives, boxcutters and mace. Antipodal as it may sound in the current climate, the true deadly weapon on Sept. 11 wasn’t anything tactile. It was surprise. The tool of choice, had it been boxcutters, butter knives, or bare knuckles and a shod foot, was effectively unimportant. We needn’t scapegoat airport workers, the FAA, or anybody who wears the uniform of an air carrier.
Lost in the outcry is the realization that incidents of terror are more the inevitable work of statistics and politics than examples of carelessness or incompetence. Just as the War on Drugs will not vanquish the supply of illicit narcotics, the War on Terror will not eliminate the supply of angry radicals. Unable to acknowledge this constructively, our stupor is unrelenting. We’re asked to accept some “new reality” of air travel, one in which irritation and fear have become institutionalized, when in fact the risks aren’t much different than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.
In spite of these threats, and to a large extent in spite of ourselves, air travel remains safe. My self-interests aside, I’ll assure you of the system’s integrity. I’d like to say more than “get out there and fly,” lest I echo some of the more infantile examples of leadership tossed our way — as if there’s nothing more noble or patriotic than to spend as much money as possible — but truly my best advice is for the public to overcome its squeamishness.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be dug from the rubble of Manhattan is the one we’re most afraid of: no system is, or ever will be, foolproof. Sobering, but we could use some cold water. What colder than conceding the more or less unstoppable, hit-em-where-they-ain’t resourcefulness of terrorism? Sound, competent security greatly improves our chances, whether against the concoctions of a single deranged individual, or organized terror from the caves of Central Asia. But with the advent of every new technology or pledge of better safeguards, we correspondingly inspire the imaginations of those who wish to defeat us.
Hence it’s time to address the terrorism issue systemically. Defusing the rage of angry radicals is a long-term anthropological mission for our leaders, not an excuse to barricade public spaces or subvert civil liberties. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Semtex, and there’s little to gain by bogging down resources in what amounts to a feel-good fantasy. At best, our implacable quest to protect ourselves makes our exceptionally safe skies that much safer. At worst, it’s paranoid overkill undermining both security and freedom.
Another deadly plot taken down in the planning stages. This time, thanks to the work of a CIA double agent, officials were able to infiltrate a Yemen-based al-Qaida plot to destroy a U.S.-bound jetliner using a nearly undetectable underwear bomb.The moral of the story: Airport security works!Am I being facetious? Not necessarily. It depends on your definition of airport security.
In my mind, the key to keeping airplanes safe is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage while they are still in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste confiscations and obsession with pointy objects, we tend not to think this way, preoccupied instead with a kind of airport Kabuki — the tedious, fanatical screening of passengers and their carry-ons. Real airport security takes place offstage, as it were. It is the job of the folks at the CIA and the FBI, working together with foreign authorities. And while TSA has an important role here too, we can do without the spectacle of airport guards rifling through innocent people’s bags in a pathological hunt for what are effectively harmless items.
The concourse checkpoint needs to be there. Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system. And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system. ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”
That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.
Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.
To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.
Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role. And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?
And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end? Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next? The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.
That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality. And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.
Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847. And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.
While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer. Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.
And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.” That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker. What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?
Strange times indeed.
The other day at Bergstrom Airport in Austin, Texas, I witnessed a striking manifestation of the new American plutocracy. Along with getting a photo at the Department of Motor Vehicles and sitting in a jury pool, standing in line at airport security with a mob of other people, miserable though it is, remains one of the few examples of civic equality in our increasingly oligarchic republic. Much airport security, of course, is theater, designed to provide alibis for bureaucrats and politicians in the event of a terrorist attack. But while we can debate what a rational airport security system would look like, no rational system would discriminate among passengers on the basis of ability to pay.
That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American. In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.
“Who are those guys?” I asked a TSA officer, when I reached the front of the second-class citizen line.
“Delta has total control over the passenger line all the way up to here,” the officer answered. “They’ve decided to let priority passengers as well as pilots and steward staff go through ahead of others.”
“So that’s the rich white guy line?” I asked.
The TSA officer laughed. “On our side of the line, everybody is equal.”
Now I would be the first to concede that what Delta and other airlines do beyond the government security checkpoint at the gates that lead to airplanes is their business. At the moment, the model of America’s pathetic, predatory, deteriorating airline industry seems to be eking out nickels and dimes by playing crudely on the snobbery of their customers, with the use of two separate lines at the terminal gates, one for priority passengers — labelled, by various airlines, Gold, Platinum, Elite and so on.
The priority line, needless to say, goes to exactly the same door and entry ramp and does not get the “elite” to its destination one second earlier. Neither de Toqueville, who commented on the contrast between the status obsessions of Americans and their professed democratic egalitarianism, nor Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” would have been surprised by this method of showing off. Such silliness is a matter for satire, not lawsuits or protest marches.
But going through airline security is different. It is not a choice, like belonging to an airline’s frequent flier points club. Security screening is an onerous civic duty. Like other civic duties, it should be shared equally by rich and poor alike. Remember the motto of Jacksonian populism? “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
Nearly all the airlines now allow well-heeled passengers to pay for the privilege of cutting ahead of the rest of us at the TSA checkpoint. At many airline checkpoints there are two lines. The long line looks like America; the short line is made up mostly of affluent white men.
Is this the future we Americans want: two lines at all airline security checkpoints, one for the privileged 1 percent and the other for the 99 percent, who have to stand aside to let the people with lots of money pass? Alas, it appears that making economic apartheid formal in U.S. civil aviation is a bad idea whose time has come. The TSA is experimenting with a “precheck” program with built-in class discrimination, including the government’s crony-capitalist invitation of frequent fliers from private U.S. airline programs, but not other American citizens, to participate:
If you are a United States citizen and are currently a member of CBP’s eligible Trusted Traveler programs (Global Entry, SENTRI, NEXUS), you are automatically qualified to participate in the TSA Pre ™ pilot as long as you are flying on a participating airline at a participating airport. (If you’re a more frequent flyer with Delta or American, you must opt in to the program by responding to the communication sent to you, which is why it’s important to find that email and follow the directions in it.)
In other words, if you do not fly frequently — and most low-income and middle-income Americans cannot afford to — you would not be allowed to take part in this public government program. In true crony capitalist fashion, the precheck program blurs the line between the government’s security function and the airlines’ purely commercial frequent flier programs.
The precheck program is advertised as an experimental program, holding out the possibility that after a period in which they are subject to more scrutiny than affluent business travelers, low-income grandmothers traveling to visit their grandchildren at last will be able to take part. More likely, the precheck program would never be extended to the masses rather than the classes. It would simply become another permanent perk of the elite, whose members would have no incentive to lobby for democratizing the program — rather the contrary.
But wouldn’t it help an overburdened airport security system to reduce the number of people to be rigorously screened by TSA? Not if it means more screening for low-income grandmothers and less for frequent business travelers. Indeed, as anti-terrorist measures, trusted traveler programs allowing affluent people who are frequent international travelers to be subjected to fewer security procedures might well backfire. Osama bin Laden and Mohamad Atta were members of the affluent social and educational elites in their countries who lived abroad and traveled frequently.
These “trusted traveler” systems will not make America safer. Their unacknowledged purpose is to create yet another area of American society that is privatized and segregated by class, to the benefit of the mostly white economic overclass.
Very well then. Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way. The degeneration of America’s democracy into a banana republic would be complete, once the Land of the Free became the Land of the Free Points With Membership.
When I wrote last week about the 2-year-old girl who, along with her whole family, was kicked off a JetBlue flight for having a tantrum, I expected an outpouring of responses. What I hadn’t imagined was how much of it would be in favor of sedating kids as a practical means of getting them from point A to point B. “You know how I traveled with toddlers?” the stay-at-home mother of two tweeted to me. “Benadryl. Works like a charm.”
I’ll admit that I was initially stunned to see how apparently commonplace the practice is. I’d never given my two daughters Benadryl or anything else to calm them down when they were young travelers, and the thought of doing so seemed wrong to me. It would have felt like a violation of their trust, a willful introduction of something unnecessary into their bodies for my own convenience.
In fairness, though, my kids have barely ever flown, and when they have, they’ve been reasonably chill. And after getting an earful from other parents both on Twitter and via email, I began to wonder if doing something that could make a child comfortable — and one’s fellow travelers considerably less inconvenienced – was such a big deal.
“I’ve totally given Benadryl as a way to get the kids to go to sleep when they were littler,” says my friend Collette, whose sons are now tweens like mine. “I think I did it about a month ago even. I would do it on a flight if I thought it would make them less freaked out.” But, she admits, “I’ve never made it a habit.”
And my friend Ted, who has two school-age daughters, regaled me with the story of flying to Florida a few years ago, “crouched down behind the row of seats in the departure lounge, feeding my perfectly healthy kids cough syrup so they will sleep, and looking guiltily around to see if I am going to be caught. Down at the other end of the long row of benches, I catch the eye of another parent doing the same thing to her daughter. All our kids rack out and we sit and laugh about it — and other kid realities — for the whole flight.”
It’s not as if this generation’s parents invented the idea of taking the edge off for our kids. We learned from the masters – our own parents. Ted says, “My parents did the same to us when we were on long road trips. We had a VW van with the back seat removed and a platform put in covered with mattresses and sleeping bags and we drove everywhere — out to the Midwest, down to Florida, New Mexico. My mother fed the three of us cough meds as we left a few times and after that it was Pavlovian — we’d all get in the car and immediately crash. I still fall asleep if I’m not driving.” Collette says that her mother used to give her whiskey in hot milk. And Monica, a mom in the Bay Area, recalls a cross-country trip with her brothers in the ’70s, when the kids “made little beds in the back of my parent’s Buick LaSabre and slept constantly.”
“It was strange to wake up and two states had gone by, or it was afternoon and suddenly it was midnight and we were checking into a hotel,” she says. “My mom was always giving us ‘vitamins’ from a tincture. I remember us all standing in the entry of our hotel room while she gave us little drops — like little birds getting a worm. Years later my mom told me what she did. She had gone to the doctor before the trip and gotten some kind of sleep aid/tranquilizer for us.”
But nothing in life, not even relaxing, over-the-counter allergy medication, is a sure thing, recalls Melissa, a mom who learned that the hard way. “We gave our newly adopted 14-month-old a dose on a flight home from China. She wound up climbing the walls, hyper-awake and restless. Never touched the stuff again.”
And Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatrician and author of “A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician’s Tour of the Body,” says, “According to a good randomized trial of Benadryl to promote sleep in infants, the drug didn’t really work any better than a placebo. So I first tell parents that it’s not really clear that Benadryl really works like many parents might think. Second, there are occasional case reports of Benadryl poisoning. Granted, those are highly unlikely, but my opinion is that parents traveling with infants should generally stay away from trying to sedate them with Benadryl, and instead focus on comforting them with feeding during takeoff and landing (may improve ear pressure equalization). Flying with infants is almost always torture,” he admits, “and unfortunately, medicating an infant isn’t going to change that.”
Yet when you’re facing a cross-country flight and a cranky kid, sometimes you’re willing to try anything. My own former pediatrician, Brooklyn’s Dr. Philippa Gordon, advises parents to be guided by equal measures of caution and instinct. “It’s a question that toggles between the pragmatic and what we find uncomfortable,” she says. “Is it a kid who has a known disorder or you know is going to have a terrible time on a flight? Or is it really more for the control of their symptoms than the comfort of other passengers? Are you medicating them for behaving like normal, developmentally appropriate children? We shouldn’t use medications just for the comfort of adults. Remember that Benadryl is an antihistamine. I try not to use over-the-counter drugs for children and toddlers, and certainly not for unintended results.” But she adds that it’s “a judgment call,” and ultimately “a relatively benign intervention.”
But my friend Helen, an advanced practice nurse specializing in maternal addiction in Philadelphia, sees it differently. “I think putting a chemical into your child’s brain in lieu of substituting appropriate comforting parenting behaviors is shameful,” she says. “Whatever happened to games, singing, soothing? I work with addicts for a living and this is the disease to its core: Can’t cope? Head for the dope! If other people on the plane get annoyed at a fussy child, then dose THEM.”
Even those of us who’ve never sedated our kids can cop to moments when we’ve considering it. I’ve certainly enjoyed a few of my children’s drowsier afternoons after they’ve had vaccinations or medication. And my friend Ava recalls a pediatrician handing her two bottles of medicine, “with instructions to be careful to give the one at night, as it would make my 8-month-old baby sleepy,” and wondering, “Just at night? When I’ve considered the tension and fighting and probable bad mothering that took place in a carful of kids on a 12-hour road trip, I’ve wondered more than once just how bad it would have been if I’d given them that night-time cold medicine. I didn’t, but I wouldn’t judge a mother who did.”
I’m still glad I got out of my children’s meltdown years without dosing them – because that feels like the right and consistent approach for our family. I still shudder at the automatic “Haven’t you ever heard of Benadryl?” response from callous adults who think any child out in public should be silent and sleepy. There’s also a world of difference when you’re dealing with a colicky baby, a tantrum-tossing toddler or a bored kindergartner, and you need to consider your options in age-appropriate ways. But in the past few days, I’ve been reminded that parenting is very much a make-it-up-as-we-go-along adventure, and that most of us really are endeavoring to do right by our children and the innocent bystanders who have to put up with them. As my writer-friend Stella says, “There are so many things you say you’ll never do/say to your kids. But any parent will tell you that raising children is all about doing the best you can with what’s at hand. Excepting actual physical injury or emotional trauma, I would never deign to judge the parental decisions someone else makes. Parenting is hard. Full stop. And you do what you can.”
Very few venues in this world — especially ones that invlove confined spaces — are thrilled to welcome a 2-year-old. Unless you’re at a Wiggles reunion show, the most common response is a lot of rolled eyes, anticipatory grimacing and the question “Can we change our seats?” So when JetBlue staff noticed young Natalie Vieau boarding a flight from Turks and Caicos with her parents and her 3-year-old sister last month, it’s possible they were already steeling themselves for Natalie to behave exactly like, well, a 2-year-old. When young Miss Vieau complied, pitching a fit that would have made Chris Brown proud, the crew kicked her and her family off the plane. Discuss.
The problem, the family says, arose when Natalie – and apparently her sister as well — didn’t appreciate the notion of sitting still and being buckled in. Natalie wanted to fly on her mother’s lap, but federal regulations require children over the age of 2 to fly in their own seats. “We were holding them down with all of our might, seat belt on,” their mother, Dr. Colette Vieau, told a Rhode Island TV station this week. “And I said, ‘We have them seated. Can we go now?’” Instead, the pilot made the decision to ground the family and have them escorted off the flight. They wound up having to book a hotel for the night and then find another flight home, to the tune of $2,000.
The very fact that Dr. Vieau describes the scene with the phrase having to use “all of our might” certainly suggests that little Natalie might be a handful. And her squirmtastic appearance on the “Today” show Monday doesn’t do much to suggest she’d have settled down for a peaceful ride back to Boston. So it’s unsurprising that when “Today” polled its viewers, “71 percent of more than 60,000 voters” agreed with the airline’s decision to kick the family off the flight.
Modern flying is horrible enough – on top of all the usual indignities, nobody wants to be trapped in the air with a pair of freaked-out toddlers. This mortified family, however, just wanted to get home, and they remain confused about just how quickly the incident escalated. As Dr. Vieau says, “We did what we were asked to do. We weren’t belligerent, drunk, angry or screaming. We were just having a hard time struggling with our children. Just some consideration, a little bit of humanity in the situation was really all I was looking for.”
What stories like this illustrate is how often that “little bit of humanity” goes wanting. And the predictably vocal response shows how badly we’ve all been burned by other people’s senses of entitlement. For their part, the Vieaus — with their Caribbean vacation, their plea that they’ve flown with their very young brood an impressive 15 times before, and their sob story of having to lay out two grand for an extra night on a tropical island — come off sounding exactly like the kind of spoiled, swaggering parents who make you avoid the playground. They may be lovely people whose kid had an off day – and if you’re a parent, you’ve likely seen plenty of those – but their story can’t engender too much sympathy. Too many of us have endured the nightmare of the family that just does not understand why little Finnegan’s meltdown is not what everyone in earshot signed up for. We’ve all seen preschoolers gone wild and parents who blithely stood by. When we hear a story about a toddler freaking out, we immediately think, fairly or not, “Spoiled parents, spoiled kids.”
That’s why the story is hard from the other side, too. Sometimes all a family has to do is go somewhere other than a Chuck E. Cheese to rile up a whole lot of tantrums – and not from the 2-year olds. You need only look as far as the frothing comments about “yuppie larvae” with “unbearable brats,” and observations that “kids just suck up oxygen and subway space anyways” to see that there’s a whole mess of preemptive rage toward children and families. And even if a child is tantruming up a storm, it’s still a stretch for an airline to claim, as the Vieaus assert, that she was “a risk to the safety and security of the aircraft in general.”
We all have to navigate a pretty crowded planet together. As Dr. Vieau herself admits, “I don’t know that I could blame JetBlue, to be totally fair. I just feel like it’s airplane travel today in general.” Kids don’t make it easy – they are volatile, difficult and often really annoying beings, it’s true. But they can’t stay home until they learn not to scream and poop in their pants. Sometimes they have to travel for family reasons, and frankly, they’re entitled to for recreational ones. They’re people, and as such, they can be jerks just like everybody else. A parent doesn’t always know, on the morning of a flight, whether she’s going to get Quiet Little Napping Girl or Hellspawn Baby for the day. The best all of us can do with other people’s kids is not be hostile just because they’re kids. And the best we can do as parents is to know when to exit gracefully.
The scourges of modern-day air travel.
I can think of a few: TSA, delayed flights, garbage in your seat pocket. Screaming kids and misdirected luggage. “CNN Airport News.”
Or, how about the blizzard of cardboard placards that hotel chains insist on littering their rooms with? I spend a quarter of my life in hotel rooms, and I resent having to spend the first five minutes of every stay gathering up an armful of this diabolical detritus and heaving it into a corner where it belongs. Attention, innkeepers: This is fundamentally bad business. One’s first moments in a hotel room should be relaxing. The room itself should impart a sense of welcome. It shouldn’t put you to work.
And here’s another one: the ever-expanding collection of electronic cords, adapters, chargers and gadgets I’m obliged to haul around with me. You know what I’m talking about. Anybody who travels regularly knows what I’m talking about. All of this, supposedly, to keep us “connected.” To make our lives easier and more productive.
Does it?
Don’t get me wrong. Riding the subway out to Logan, I love being able to pop in my earbuds and catch a few cuts from the Wedding Present, the Jazz Butcher or the Velvet Underground. And my MacBook Air is as essential for travel as a change of socks. But there is, or was, something to be said for that unplugged, disconnected age of not so long ago. If nothing else, our carry-ons were lighter, with more room for clothes.
The photo above shows the assortment of electronic gadget and gizmos I take with me pretty much every time I hit the road, be it for work or pleasure. As recently as a decade ago I owned none of this. I didn’t even have a cellphone until 2006.
Clockwise-ish, from upper left:
– That black case contains the camera that I used to take this picture. I currently use a Panasonic DMC-LX3. It’s a decent point-and-shoot with a Leica lens and super-long battery life. (The more recent pictures in my Flickr archives were taken with this camera.) I bring it with me on most, though not all, of my layovers and holidays.
– Earbuds. I recently upgraded to a pair of Klipsch and retired this Apple set.
– 32GB flash drive. For my backup files, and for transferring to and from my “master” computer at home.
– USB connector for camera (optional).
– Ethernet cord. Useful in those (too many) hotels where Wi-Fi is weak and a wired connection runs more robustly. Hotel-supplied Ethernet cords are often broken.
– Power adapter for laptop.
– AC adapter set. Essential when traveling overseas. One problem is, if I’m assigned to reserve status I often don’t know if I’ll be heading overseas until the last minute, so I’ve always got this with me.
– iPhone 4. Product unplug: Am I the only person who despises — and I mean really despises — the iPhone’s messaging keypad? Because the special function keys — caps, space bar, backspace and return — are so close to the normal character keys, I’m constantly capitalizing, spacing and backspacing when I don’t mean to. This happens in either the vertical or horizontal layout, and it’s especially annoying for those of us with fat fingers. It takes me five attempts to complete the simplest sentence.
– USB charger for iPhone.
– USB-to-AC connector thing for iPhone (optional, but a good thing to have).
– USB-to-Ethernet adapter (see Ethernet cord above).
And, in the middle of it all, my beloved MacBook Air.
All together, we’re looking at roughly five pounds of technology that, for all intents and purposes, is mandatory carry-on. Sometimes it’s slightly less, other times slightly more. Not shown, for instance, is my Flip video camera, which I bring on longer trips. ( Flip brought you this, among other works of directorial art.)
Thus the real must-have gadget is a decent case or container in which to consolidate all of this crap. For me, most of the more wiry components above fit nicely into an old business class amenities kit, which keeps them out of the way and avoids tangles. (How frustrating is it, meanwhile, that so many electronic devices require their own proprietary charging cord or adapter? Imagine if every lamp took a different kind of light bulb.)
The amenities case, together with the laptop, camera and phone, fit snugly into either of my larger carry-ons. Now that my flight case has been retired — a milestone previously detailed here — I typically go to work with two pieces of luggage:
The first is a custom crew roll-aboard from Luggage Works. At the moment I use the 26-inch LW with the plastic frame, which is much lighter than the more popular metal frame version. To make it even lighter, I’ve retrofitted the stainless steel retractable handle with an aluminum one.
I don’t know what “custom crew” means. I just thought it sounded cool. Over 95 percent of LW users are airline crew members, but anybody can order one.
A number of my colleagues use Travelpro bags (I’ve owned a couple of Travelpros over the years), but on the whole that brand is more popular with flight attendants than with pilots.
For a long time pilots resisted using roll-aboards at all. The thinking was that rolling your belongings was, like, too effeminate for the macho pilot (take me, for example). And so pilots would hand-haul their 40-odd pounds of personal luggage and pilot gear through the airport, toning their tough-guy biceps and making many a chiropractor happy.
By the way, have you ever heard somebody refer to roll-aboard bags as “roller board” bags? I was on a plane a few weeks ago and the flight attendant made an announcement reminding people to stow their “roller boards” handle-first into the bins.
My smaller bag, hung from my roller board using a hook that I designed myself, is a $300 Tumi briefcase that I bought about six months ago and quickly learned to hate, with its useless, miniature exterior pockets that I can barely squeeze my fingers into.
I’m something of a pro when it comes to short-notice, multi-climate packing. Here’s a tip: Go with lightweight clothing. What a concept, I know, but I’m amazed by how many people travel with heavy cotton jeans — even to hot climates. I own a lot of fast-dry synthetics. They’re not stylish, but when have I ever been? On the other hand I can launder a pair of pants in the hotel room bathtub and they’re dry before morning.
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GO-AROUNDS
Re: The Funniest Thing Ever Written
Several readers emailed demanding that I immediately scan and post copies of the 1988 “Guide to Harvard University Dining Services” booklet that I wrote about last week. A great idea, but the thing is 38 double-sided pages long. Tell you what: I’ll do it, but not for free. My price is $5, sent to my PayPal account. I figure if 20 people are interested, that’s $100, which makes it worth my trouble. Once I hit a hundred bucks I’ll send scans of every page to anybody who wants to see them, or else I’ll post them somewhere on my home site. If I don’t hit the $100 mark within the next 10 days I’ll refund your donations. (I really don’t expect to bring in much beyond that, as people will be waiting for the early birds to cover the cost.)
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Travelers line up at a TSA checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport.
(Credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok) 
(Credit: Reuters/Salon) 
(Credit: Ilya Andriyanov and KAMONRAT via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Kenneth Man via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Patrick Smith) 
