In Spite Of It All, People Are Good People

This post is just me telling you something that happened to me, nothing about any school district or anything, just a personal story. This weekend was my dad's 85th birthday, and all of us kids flew in to Arizona to surprise him. I checked a bag into the airport at National Airport, in Washington, and picked it up in Phoenix. When I got my bag off the carousel it was open. It had been unzipped, I suppose by government contractors who needed to inspect it in case I was shipping a bomb on the plane, but they hadn't bothered to close it again. But just a minute, let me go back to my story.

When I got off the plane at Sky Harbor, it turned out that there's really no advantage to reserving a shuttle. You walk up, you get the same service as if you called the day before. They call for the vehicle once you are physically present, either way.

My hotel was out in Mesa, a little ways from the airport, so I had to wait about a half an hour until they had enough people to make it worthwhile to drive out there.

When we finally took off, there were five of us in the car: the driver, a lady, and three guys. The other guys were both about my age, or at least in their forties. The lady was younger, mid-thirtyish, and the driver was a young black man.

I have never seen anything like this. Immediately, before we'd even left the airport, the talk turned to politics and the miserable state of our country. Normally strangers in a situation like this find something generic to discuss, something that won't offend anyone or embarrass them. But man, they went through it all, the national debt and what will happen if China refuses to lend us more money, who's going to run in 2008 (can you imagine if it's Hillary versus Condi? -- Nobody seemed too happy with that idea, though the lady thought it would be better to have a female President), gas prices and why we weren't prepared for this situation, the war in Iraq of course, Katrina...

One guy, who had seemed friendly at first, quickly dropped out of the conversation, and it is possible he was a Bush sympathizer of some sort, one of the stubborn thirty-two percent (the "backwash") who think this is how it's supposed to be. But the strange thing was, nobody cared if he was left out; this group was beyond the point where they would let the conversation be held hostage by one guy. I travel a lot, and usually these conversations are about 1.the weather, and 2.problems somebody had on their flight. The lady was asking what can we do about the situation in Africa, with the genocide -- she'd seen a TV special with George Clooney, and knew that people were upset about it, but the government wouldn't do anything about it.

"What we should do," she said, "Is to get all the countries together and go in there and straighten that situation out."

It came down to one person saying, "The fact is, our government couldn't do that, because they're incompetent."

Oh, and the idea that we would nuke Iran -- the people in the shuttle could only laugh. They know we'll probably do it, and it's so ridiculous, it's so un-American, it's so fake. "All options are on the table," we said, and we laughed uncomfortably, because it's more like a cartoon than real life.

It went like that.

In all these years I have never seen a conversation among absolute strangers in America that went this way.

They dropped me off first. The driver came back to get my stuff. I gave him a couple bucks extra and said, "Well, that was a more interesting conversation than most."

"Man," he said, "That's all I hear every day. You know, I don't say nothing, but if you ask me, we ought to take care of our own problems first, before we start telling other countries what to do." He wanted to keep talking, in fact he stood there going on and on, and I felt a little rude pulling myself away, but I wanted to get checked in.

Up in my room on the third floor, I thought I'd better check my bag in case anything was missing. At the airport I'd glanced, and saw the main stuff -- a couple of shirts, my cell-phone charger -- was there, so I wasn't too worried.

I opened the bag. Lying on top of my stuff was a little box of cards. Something sentimental my wife slipped in there, I figured, she does that sometimes, little notes and sweet things. Uh, no. It was a bunch of Pillsbury Dough-Boy greeting cards with recipes on them. And under that, a section of the San Francisco Chronicle, with the "Bay Area's 100 Best Restaurants." And next to that, a green sweatshirt I'd never seen before. All my stuff was there, plus these other things.

Welcome to the post-9-11 world. A billion bags a month they look at (I'm just guessing, but there's a whole bunch), a million people a day through the metal detectors, all this serious stuff about not joking while you're walking through. Random searches, pat-downs, women to search the women and men to search the men, and not one terrorist has been stopped. I saw an old man a couple of weeks ago get caught by an airport beagle, trying to smuggle an apple into the US from England. That's it, apples. Oh, and they have to x-ray your shoes, of course. And did you know, fingernail clippers are OK now, but lighters aren't? This is the least effective tactic imaginable for making anybody safer, and they don't really care, and it shows.

My whole family was "randomly" selected to be pulled aside recently, to have some idiots go through everything in our carry-on bags. Come on, I'm going to blow up a plane with my wife and kids on it?

We don't complain, we just go along with all of it. We don't expect to be treated with respect. They open your bag, they dump the stuff out, they mix it up with somebody else's stuff, they don't bother to zip it again. Because you might have been a terrorist. You weren't, this time, but you might have been. Well, nobody ever is, but ... it could happen, and it doesn't matter if that's your stuff in your bag or somebody else's -- you're all just potential terrorists anyway.

I don't think people can live like this, and I think it's starting to change. A whole generation of Americans is learning a big lesson. Fear is not a way of life, it is not a rational reaction to a catastrophe. Fear does not give you guidance for making decisions, it only makes you stupid. People want to like one another, they want to laugh and love, and they're going to do that -- oh, they may hold it in for a while, maybe even a couple of years, but in the long run, people are good people.