Shortly after 9/11, I broke my knee in a sporting accident. It took me six months of recovery before I was able to walk without any assistance or devices.
My first post-9/11 flight home to see my parents was out of Newark airport in mid-December of that year. Distances being deceiving inside an airport, I asked for a wheelchair, because hobbling to the gate on crutches would only make me miss my flight (and inspire a new category of disabled marathon).
Rolling through the various stages of airport security in the prevailing hysteria I counted a small army of obese New Jersey police officers, coated with a light dusting of donut sugar, sprinkled in groups of two and three throughout the terminal, looking inattentive. Sometimes, they were joined by equally-inattentive, younger, slimmer gentlemen in army fatigues toting loaded M-16 assault rifles.
To give a sense of context here, during my military service in the IDF, I was required to stand a watch over settlements in the West Bank every year. Because the army wanted to avoid "incidents", a standing order was issued that all watches be kept with magazines unloaded from our rifles. This is three steps down from actual readiness to fire: safety on, no round loaded in the chamber, and no magazine to supply rounds to the rifle. In the event that I would be fired upon, I'd have to spend precious seconds fumbling a magazine out of my belt and into my rifle, drawing a round, and releasing the safety before returning fire. Seconds in which my life was at stake, and that of every family standing behind my watch.
Not to be heavy-handed, but that was a situation which demanded an healthy amount of fear, and the military still didn't permit me to stand watch with a bullet anywhere near my rifle.
As I rolled by those national guardsmen, my mouth hung agape. There was a terminal full of indifferent, inattentive men with loaded rifles—maybe even rounds in the chamber.
All it would take is a handful of men to overcome one of these sentry teams, and we'd have a columbine reenactment in our airports. Terrorism armed by our own security. The rest of the security forces might have responded adequately, containing the amount of death somewhat, assuming they dropped their donuts in time and paid attention to the sound of automatic gunfire and death—but we'd still have a hell of a body count.
And then, they let me take my crutches onto an airplane without so much as a security screening to see if they were filled with explosives.