I try to avoid writing about current events, politics, and the news in general. To say that I am not much interested in these things would explain, in part, why. To say that I know nothing about them would perhaps be even more accurate. But I feel led to submit a new terrorist-control concept to those government agencies responsible for creating Denzel Washington movies/antiterrorist tactics used on airplanes.
Terrorists seem to pop up in lots of different places, but an old favorite, dating back to the time of the ancient Phoenicians, is the airliner. What do you do when you discover, at 35,000 feet and 780 miles off the coast of the New Brunswick, that you have a squad of terrorists onboard? You can't exactly evacuate the building, and starting a shootout, as we all know from watching James Bond, will result in everybody being sucked out of the plane through the windows.
My suggestion is simple and completely organic. So simple that a child could do it. In fact it requires a child. To be specific, it requires the child who was seated...rather, who was traveling in seat 15B on American Airlines Flight 1250 from Dallas Ft. Worth to Atlanta on the morning of July 26, 2007. Actually, her mother was seated in 15B, and she herself (the child) was in her mother's lap the entire trip, facing all passengers west of row 15.
Coming now to the crux of this discussion: How can this particular flaxen-haired female snippet of a person - probably two years old at most - have anything to do with terrorist control? To answer this, we must examine the word "freedom."
To many, freedom means doing whatever they jolly well please, even at the expense of everyone else around them. comes to mind here (since I don't read or watch the news, you may fill in your favorite celebrity). But to most of us mature Americans, we understand that freedom comes at the price of having a few restrictions placed upon us. We understand, for instance, that when we are told to stop driving gas-guzzeling automobiles all over the place so that there will be air for our grandchildren to breath, we must downsize from a Suburban to a Tahoe.
So it should not disturb most Americans to learn that complete crowd control is necessary for complete terrorist control. And this aforementioned child has the ability to control the complete crowd. Her tactics are time-honored, and as stated above, completely organic; screaming.
You have obviously heard of threshold shift, which is the unmistakable lowering in perceived volume of an existing sound caused by the introduction of a second sound of a ridiculously higher volume level. This young siren of 15B had the ability to cause the sound of two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines to completely disappear for five or six seconds at a time. And unlike some infants who scream perpetually for three or four minutes, only desisting long enough to gasp for breath, and then falling fast asleep, 15B uttered totally controlled, and dangerously upsetting bursts of unflagging noise throughout the course of our flight time of just over two hours and twenty-one minutes. She didn't seem to be upset about anything at all. She merely screamed for the joy of noise and the desire to control entire populations.
And thus her effect on the general population of Flight 1250 was that of our attention being totally arrested. Every single time this youngster let out a howl, every head in the fuselage turned toward her. Every book, magazine, and newspaper suspended its hold on the reader. Every pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones revealed their inherent limitations to its wearer.
As stated earlier, for true freedom to exist, there must be sacrifices made by the public. In order for Agent 15B to be an effective weapon in the fight against terrorism, each passenger onboard will be under her total command. She will control conversation, sleep, bathroom traffic, iPods, Sudoku, and in-flight meals - wait, there are no in-flight meals. The innocent, as well as the guilty will be completely at her mercy.
Some will not enjoy this treatment. The guy seated next to me eventually began cursing violently every time she woke him from his dreams, and he didn't appear to be a mental patient or a sailor. The upside, though, will be freedom from terrorist in the air.
Terrorist ON the air, however, still remains a tough question. To overcome the noise of two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines is one thing. To overcome the noise of county music is another thing altogether.
Dane Tate
7/29/07