Swanky blathered a pretty decent post today.
When was the last time anyone you knew was poisoned by a product tampered with in a store? But how many times have you started to squeeze out some mustard or pour some honey and realized you had to open it up and remove the “tamper proof seal?”
“Some sort of terrorist inoculated Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, killing seven people. However, that frightening and much-publicized event (it generated 125,000 stories in the print media alone and cost the manufacturer more than $1 billion) failed to inspire much in the way of imitation.”
We’ve all complained about the endless child-proofing and tamper-prevention of things…
But I have no sense of humour today. I have to take exception, and remember some history.
Back in the 1970’s, American had gone through two oil embargos on such a grand scale that many of our local gas stations were forced to close. Electricity prices skyrocketed. In some areas, water was dangerously close to being rationed. There were a rash of airline hijackings. There were hundreds and hundreds of hostage situations. Our Export program was completely in the toilet.
In the 1980’s, as hard as things were, a lot of that changed. We began meddling in the affairs of the Middle East more actively, and have avoided multiple embargoes. Electricity prices declined as nuclear power and better infrastructure was instated. The rise in water prices also allowed for better infrastructure. Airline hijackings dropped as metal detectors became the norm, and we expected no less in other countries. Nobody dared take hostages any more. And our exports increased exponentially as our newer “shelf stable,” sealed packaging allowed us to send food and pharmaceuticals to countries we’d never been able to before, regardless of the climate.
All the complaining we do can’t measure up to the fact that tamper-resistant seals had enough benefits to help the entire country at the expense of minor annoyance.
But, seeing John Mueller’s article, “A False Sense of Insecurity,” mixed in there and applied just goes to show me how completely uninformed most Americans are. Especially college kids from OSU who’ve never worked in the real world.
“Public Hysteria” about terrorism, I feel, is in the public’s best interest. Americans need to wake the Hell up and realize things were already bad well before 9/11, and well before weird foreign wars that Media will certainly tell us are right-wing conspiracies. They also need to know what’s coming.
When I started travelling the world in 1996, the State Department said, “Hey, don’t go to this list of twenty-four countries, because as an American, you may be a victim of terrorism.”
But by 1998, it had been amended to say, “Don’t travel out of the country. Nowhere. You’ll probably be a victim of terrorism, because the rest of the world hate us and has little regard for human life.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the sentiment is true.
The really nasty part comes in the fact that 9/11 killed more people than the last thirty years of terrorism combined. That one day killed more people than the constant border-struggles between Lebanon and Israel.
Times they are a-changing. They’re setting their sights higher.
The terrorists have indeed won. No, they didn’t blow us all up. They just made us all so scared of a few dozen guys in the desert that we do all sorts of stupid, costly and annoying things, to ourselves and others. And, I might add, do all these things rather than help out our fellow Americans and humans. Taking money out of positive and helpful pursuits and into all sorts of things that help no one.
I can remember how people complained about metal detectors in airports back in the 80’s.
“How is me taking all the loose change out of my pocket going to affect whether some Iranian steals a plane or not? Why are we wasting all of this money rather than doing something positive with it?”
Ten years later, people didn’t see it as an inconvenience. And, of course, flight crimes decreased exponentially. People were less afraid to fly, and prices dropped drastically.
Eventually, we stopped seeing it as an inconvenience, and dropped our guard.
9/11 kinda proved that. Who would’ve thought a box cutter was a bad thing to have on a plane? Certainly not the 450 people who died on the planes that day.
That caused public hysteria. People were scared as Hell to fly any more. And so they have a false of security — at least they’re getting back on the planes, giving money to an industry that was failing miserably in the wake of it all. A lot of companies are hiring Fast Guard security to protect them and their customers. The rest of the world hates America. And it has nothing to do with the current President, politics, foreign policy, or anything else. It’s simply due to the fact that the majority of the world is Socialist. People are told what to think, what to buy and where to buy it. All of their best products are exported out of the countries, while their citizens get to “make due” with whatever scraps and second-hand items are around.
The only people telling us what to think are Academics (who repeatedly show that they have less experience than idealogy), Media (constantly for fodder to increase their profits) and Politicians (who will lie, cheat and omit to forward their own lust for power). We can buy most anything we want anywhere we want. And we get to enjoy the spoils of our efforts in manufacturing -and- trade (think our products suck, being that they’re all from China? Try buying the same product in another country and you’ll realize — we do get the best of everything!).
And, c’mon, Swanky, be honest… When’s the last time you were harrassed and inconvenienced by the guys at the gates? 😉
