Returning to the Skies

This year, as was well expected, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report for November reported that the number of air travelers nationwide cancelling flights returning home for the Thanksgiving holiday was much higher than average. Although not yet certain, the same trend might well be expected for the upcoming Christmas holiday. As sincerely as our nation pledged in September to ignore the attempted assault of terrorism on the American spirit and the way of life this spirit sustains, these numbers show that it’s still difficult for some to board a 747 without images of armed hijackers, diverted travel routes and crumbling towers crossing their minds. Even several months after the fact, the attacks cast a long shadow on America’s confidence in her highways in the sky.

That some Americans have lost their confidence in a form of travel that has become an essential part of everyday life is not so much unfortunate as it is completely normal. Investors worldwide were apprehensive for months about returning to the everyday, buy-low-sell-high routines of a market that had free-fallen 30 percent in just several weeks after 1987’s Black Monday. High school students nationwide were wary of returning to their hall lockers and classrooms for weeks after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Not only had these two tragedies come without warning, they had jolted the tranquility of America’s seemingly peaceful state of affairs and undermined the confidence of Americans everywhere. They had shown us that even when we ride high, even when we have developed measures of prevention for all but the unthinkable, it is sometimes the unthinkable itself that emerges. These two particular “unthinkables” of the last two decades struck us in places where it hurt the most, in the places that nourish our confidence in the future: our wallets and our children.

Today, the “unthinkable” has eliminated our confidence in the safety of the daily routines of our lives. While a normal reaction to this “unthinkable,” our loss of confidence in air travel is no doubt what Osama bin Laden had in store for us. His attacks were designed to undermine our confidence by doing the unthinkable. While our loss of confidence is intangible, this feeling of insecurity gives bin Laden an upper hand in his assault on Americanism.

But to ask America to react to his assault in such a way as to deny him this small victory is to ask us to deny our normal impulse to feel apprehension and wariness. Despite our desire to strike back, the return to normality that President George W. Bush advocated in September cannot preclude these all-too-human impulses.

In bin Laden’s book, we may have lost the upper hand, but then again, his is a book that preaches destruction, revenge and wholesale slaughter. His was an assault that dictated its own ghastly terms, that wrote its own rules of war. In our own book of rules, though, the unthinkable is sometimes unpreventable, apprehension is sometimes inevitable and our loss of confidence in air travel is sometimes normal.

The winter holidays are here to remind us of the family and friends we have. The knowledge that the tragedy of September took some of these away still rides in the backs of our minds. It probably should. There’s nothing abnormal about feeling apprehensive, nothing abnormal about the inability to prevent the unthinkable, and nothing abnormal about America’s loss of confidence in her skyways. Bin Laden’s assault may have written its own rules of gaining the upper hand in war, but our reaction to it should not, even in an attempt to ignore his attempt to assault the American spirit, rewrite the rules of what is normal for us.