Jon’s posting on the security changes at Heathrow led me to start writing a comment on his site complimenting him on his eloquence, but it started leading on to me writing more and more, to the point where I thought I might as well actually stick it on my site instead.
I hadn’t really summoned up the energy to comment on all these security measures that have been recently introduced as a result of the liquid bomb plot. One of the reasons for this is that I am so far away from it all, that it seems a little unreal, like it’s happening on a different planet. I am not flying anywhere at the moment, and no one really talks much about it over here – just a shrug and a “what can you do?”.
As an aside, I did read an article in one paper where it was claimed that Dame Kiri Te Kanawa had said that (or words to the effect of) she was living in fear of terrorism in London, and so were all her friends. One of them has got to the point of wearing special underwear if they are going to travel on the tube so that if there was an attack it wouldn’t stick to them. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what I thought of that.
My main feeling about it has been that it is all so sad. It’s sad to see people taken off planes because the passengers don’t like the look of them. It’s sad when an accident with a toilet leads to a plane being diverted and a kid is drilled by customs officials for hours. Our way of life is slowly being eroded into one where there is a continual climate of fear and mistrust, created by unnecessary or futile efforts to make life safer. These changes at the airport are just the latest part of that erosion. Slowly but surely our freedoms are being stripped away, destroying the very essence of what it is that politicians claim to hold so dear, with the baying mob of the media cheering it all on from the sidelines.
It doesn’t just make me sad, it scares me, disturbs me, and makes me worried about the future. But not because I am scared that someone I know and care about might be horrifically injured or killed in a bombing. Or that it might even be me. No, it scares me because by the time something like that happens, I won’t even recognise the country I live in, and I might not even be able to write something like this without fear of reprisals of some kind. The people who put bombs on planes or trains, in litter bins, and those who blow themselves up in the process are certainly no friend of mine, and I want us to make every reasonable effort to stop them. But if that means that we can no longer carry a bottle of water somewhere (water ffs!!) or take an inhaler on a plane, then we have passed well beyond the realms of reasonable into a world that is just absurb.