Have Terror, Will Travel...

Every time I fly on a plane, I reflect on how exactly my life has been affected by all of the changes that have come into the world since September 11, 2001. It can be just the little things like being dehydrated after a flight or knowing that the government is more interested in reading my emails.

Sometimes though, the terrorism threats feel very real and they hit close to home. What follows is a story as I related it to friends and family in an email in July 2004.

"I just wanted to notify you all of a very dangerous situation that occurred to me last week while doing my daily commute home from work. Because of security risks that have been happening, all commuter trains have been on a heightened state of alert and so many of the passengers and railroad personnel have done an excellent job of making sure of our safety. Before you go on, I just want to ensure you of it's truthfulness and that it really did happen to me.
"Last Friday evening, a bomb scare shut down the commuter rail line that runs from Chicago to the western suburbs because of a suspicious package that was on the 4:44 train. We were stuck on our train in the train yard for 30 minutes and then were forced to walk the last half mile to our cars. Others had to wait more than an hour for buses to get to their train station during rush hour and then sit on a bus to get home. The fire department sent out the bomb squad, the immediate area of the station was evacuated, and all emergency personnel were put on alert. "The immediate area around the package was quarantined and stabilized, but the package itself began to move. After and exhaustive attempt to defuse the situation without putting any of the brave personnel in uniform in any undue rink, the suspect package was found to contain a hamster.
"Just so you know, I was neither hurt nor terrorized during this incident. I was actually rather amused.
"P.S. The hamster found a very happy home with one of the fire fighters."

Despite the lightness of that incident, I know that in many ways the order of things post 9/11 is very different than it was before that day. Like so many social changes that happen, most of them didn’t occur right after the terror attacks happened in 2001 but it was a more gradual shift so that we could become more used to the idea.

I didn’t fly after 9/11 for six weeks, but at that time we still had National Guard personnel manning the security checkpoints at airports with automatic weapon. That was uncomfortable. That has since changed. When I went to the Louvre in 2006, the military presence at the entrance there was also heavily armed and I imagine they could use their weapons just as easily as those who were at the US airports in 2001. But there it didn’t feel as out of place because as an American, the threat of terrorism has always felt like a faraway or foreign problem. Every once in a while we have moments like the great hamster episode that remind us that even here we are vulnerable, but I’m not ready yet to allow the automatic weapons to patrol the grounds around the Museum Campus just yet.