Twenty Years In ...

A small story about air travel in the wake of 9-11: When sports resumed, I was assigned to cover the Virginia Tech at West Virginia football game in early October. Flight from Norfolk to Pittsburgh, rent a car, hour-plus drive to Morgantown.

Much has been made of the national comity after the terrorist attacks, but in the days and weeks following 9-11, airports were tense places. People wary, on edge. Folks climbing into vehicles that were used as missiles, others desperately working to avoid a repeat. I arrived in plenty of time and crept through the check-in line. Here’s what I wrote a few days later, as part of a mostly football piece:

… “Security officials ran my carry-on bag through the X-ray machine twice and asked me to open my shaving kit. The officer rifled through it and pulled out a set of nail clippers. You cannot travel with this, he said. Really, I asked. He then swiveled the 3-inch nail file around the base, demonstrating how it could be a weapon.

OK, I said, can I get it back after my return flight Sunday? A serious man with a serious job, he looked at me as if I had asked him to dance. No sir, he said, this goes to the police. The police want my nail clippers, I asked. This goes to the police, he repeated. Whatever you say, sir.

Repacked my stuff and headed for the gate. Imagined an evidence room at the station house with confiscated guns on one side, confiscated drugs on the other, a small tub of confiscated nail clippers in the middle and a precinct full of well-manicured policemen.”

After the attacks, our leaders stressed the need for vigilance as they encouraged everyone to return to leading normal lives, which prompted me to routinely deliver stupid non sequiturs: If you settle for the fish sandwich and don’t get the seafood platter, the terrorists win; if we don’t get tickets for Blues Traveler, the terrorists win.

I’ll keep the gasbagging to a minimum, since I’m more practiced and comfortable reporting and observing, rather than offering opinions. But 9-11 seemed to unleash streaks of jingoist and nativist behavior that inform our thoughts and actions to this day. It also appears to have contributed to our increasingly tribal divide.

Certainly, there have been victories in the 20 years since 9-11. No major terrorist attacks on our soil. Far more robust and broader communications systems. We off’d bin Laden. But the costs have been enormous, in financial and human terms, and to our national standing and prestige around the world. Brown University conducted a Costs of War project that concluded, among other things, at least 897,000 people around the world have died due to violence linked to the War on Terror. At least 38 million people around the world have been displaced, and the effort has cost the U.S. at least $5.8 trillion, with more to come.

A case can be made that, in some ways, the terrorists did win.