Columnist Mike O’Callaghan: Americans must get used to inconvenience for safety

Friday, Sept. 21, 2001 | 4:53 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is executive editor of the Sun and publisher of the Henderson Home News, where this column first appeared.

We keep hearing people remark that our country has become a different society since the deadly terrorist attack last week. I'm not sure that they are correct, and if they are right about this, we had better make certain that some changes aren't temporary.

It's my opinion that to survive we are going to make some security changes or we will lose this conflict with barbarians who will use our open society to destroy us. On the other hand, we must make certain we don't destroy the important elements of a free society in an effort to protect those aspects of life we cherish. This all comes down to our ability of accepting and practicing a greater degree of personal discipline than most of us have been willing to accept in past years.

Continually we hear people complain about being required to wait more than a few minutes for service at stores, theaters, restaurants and airports. During the next few weeks and months there will be less vocal complaining in our airports. Travelers like to arrive safely at their destinations and not die crashing into a tall building or a field on the way. Scenes televised from New York, a field in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon last week have been burned into the minds of most Americans, especially those who travel by air.

For almost two decades I have had to be at the airport in Israel at least two or three hours before flight time. Always my travel has been on that nation's El Al planes, which have strict security rules and regulations. The questions asked as they go through my luggage are sometimes very personal and the security people won't accept evasive answers. Why are you in Israel? What are you doing in Israel? Where have you traveled? Where did you stay? Do you have relatives here? Who are they and what is their telephone number? Who did you visit? What is their telephone number? Yes, before you board your aircraft they have probably called the telephone numbers you gave them. The El Al security people have been highly trained and they use profiling when looking at you and listening to your answers. You know this as the practice that U.S. courts and civil libertari an groups have condemned because it might be abused. Most people traveling in the Middle East find that these inconvenience! s are worth suffering if they arrive safely at their destination.

Israel isn't the only place travelers are profiled by security people. Because of my surname I was stopped in a London airport after an Irish terrorist with the same name had bombed a nearby facility. If my name was Swenson, Haddad, or Liu I wouldn't have been searched. El Al always has a couple of armed sky marshals seated separately some place on the plane. My friends and I play the game of trying to figure out who the armed security people are during the flight. We find that we are more often wrong than right when guessing. Even more often we never know who they were even after arriving safely in Cairo, Amsterdam, London or Los Angeles. Their identity doesn't really matter because we have arrived in good health.

During the initial spate of skyjacking, back many years ago, armed sky marshals were assigned to most U.S. commercial flights. After a period of time the cost and lack of action resulted in their dismissal by the FAA and airlines. Will this scene be replayed one, two or three years from now after things "cool down"?

There have been some immediate changes in our travel habits, and they will be accepted by Americans until the television scenes from New York City, a field in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon fade from their minds. Then what? Short memories and personal comfort have too long allowed Americans to allow disasters to be repeated in different forms. Will it be deadly gas, disease or a compact nuclear bomb the next time? Some terrorists are still here and more are on their way. Even more Americans will die unless they are hunted down and killed before they can strike again. All of us can help protect our way of life by practicing more self-discipline and keeping informed about what is going on around us. Finally, we had better not forget what happened last week.