Why don't I glow?

 

Seriously. When I was a tyke (yes! tyke!) it was a common practice, at least in Lincoln, Nebraska, for shoe stores to have X-ray machines into which one could stick one's feet to see if one's new shoes fit. These machines were vertical boxes with toe space along one side of the bottom, like the toe space under a kitchen counter only deeper, and three viewing ports on the top. In the children's shoe store, one viewing port would be low enough so a tyke could look into it; the other two were for the sales person and the Mommy. I loved going to the shoe store and watching my toes wiggle.

 

When my mom took me and my little sister shopping at a department store downtown (nobody did pre-school or day care in the 40's, that's what moms were for) my sister and I would run off to the shoe department to play while mom shopped. Play with the X-ray machine. You looked in there, your feet would be all green and you could see the bones. Cool.

 

In the late 40's and early 50's I'm pretty sure I got an X-ray every time I went to the dentist. Whenever you twisted your ankle it would get X-rayed to to see if it was broken. And just for good measure, some guys with a big van would come around to the schools every year so all the kiddies could get their chests X-rayed for TB. 

 

I've lost count of the number of things, just in my lifetime (see, I'm not even counting trying to cure syphilis with arsenic) that started out as a really good thing and turned out, later, to be holy shit that stuff will kill you, run!

 

So I'm not too worked up about all this fuss at the airports. Suck it up, get yourself zapped, and get on the plane to Topeka. If you're going to Topeka, that's what you deserve.

 

That said, I have a whole lot of trouble thinking all this airport stuff is much more than an entertainment designed to make some people feel safer, some richer, and cover (but thoroughly scan) everybody's collective ass. Sure enough some day some terrorist will blow up an airplane but flying is still a whole lot safer than driving and nobody even checks your breath when you get into your car. More to the point, nobody checks the other guy's. (And if the new airport searches persuade more people to drive, it's likely more people will die on highways this year.) 

 

Every year flu puts more than 200,000 people in a hospital and somewhere between 3,300 and 49,000 of them die, depending on how severe a given year's flu strain is, and yet something like 43 percent of Americans decline the usually free and generally safe shot that would prevent them from getting it at all. 

 

We - humans, I'm talking about here, not necessarily just Americans, although I sometimes wonder - are really, really bad at assessing risk. It would be nice to think the people who are friggin' paid to do it are somehow better, but I fear they're not.