Making a tough call on Christmas

JOSEPH N. BELL

A funny thing happened on our way to Paris on Christmas Day. We

didn’t go.

Our bags were packed and stacked beside the front door. Our

wallets were bulging with Euros. And our hearts were settled around a

fireplace in Provence, sharing a glass of wine and good talk with our

dear friends who live there.

That’s when we heard the first report on television that Air

France was canceling a group of flights to and from Los Angeles

because they were targeted for skyjacking by Al Qaeda. One of the

flight numbers was ours.

There was no point in being angry with the Air France agent I

finally got through to on the phone, but I suspect I was. He

confirmed the cancellation and said the earliest they could get us

out of Los Angeles on Air France was three days later. Maybe. And

other options were even worse. And so we agonized against a backdrop

of ominous warnings on the news and finally, reluctantly, painfully

let go of the trip we’d been so looking forward to for several

months.

As we huddled morosely around the TV set, listening to a cacophony

of reports feeding the speculation that the terrorists who engineered

the destruction on Sept. 11, 2001, were planning a repeat performance

over the Christmas holidays, our decision to abandon the trip seemed

the only rational option left to us.

We were committed to our return date, which would have left us

ridiculously little time in France, much of it in a state of

exhaustion. Then, there was no certainty that the new flight we were

offered or the return flight already booked would operate on schedule

-- or at all. And the Los Angeles airport was a zoo, requiring

several extra hours to negotiate the roadblocks there to be certain

of making a scheduled flight.

But the most important deterrent for me was a look at the odds.

Since I started playing poker for pennies in the seventh grade, I’ve

been conscious of odds. I don’t believe in determinism in human

affairs.

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is cosmic rotten luck.

But bucking substantial odds unnecessarily is bad judgment. And the

odds against flying abroad over the Christmas holidays grew

appreciably larger with every new warning from the people charged

with our security.

I hold a lot of reservations about the accuracy of our

intelligence. This is the same bunch who brushed off early signals of

what was to happen on Sept. 11, 2001, and then told us that Iraq was

loaded with weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was in bed

with Al Qaeda. Some of the evidence for the security warnings

described in the news over the holidays struck me as reaching into

the stratosphere -- especially checking the names on flight manifests

to see if any of them rang an Al Qaeda bell.

These terrorists may be consummately evil, but they aren’t stupid

enough to use recognizable names on a passenger list. As a result, a

lot of people with Arabic names traveling to visit their families

spent a lot of hours in airport interrogation rooms.

But these are excessive times, subject to excessive measures. The

problem is deciding when the measures are so excessive that they

serve the interests of the terrorists by eating away unnecessarily at

our personal freedoms, which are our greatest strengths.

We’ll probably never know if these holiday fears were real or if

the terrorists were floating them to muck up our Christmas. All I

know for sure is that the people in charge of such matters in both

France and the U.S. decided the threats were real enough to cancel

our flight -- and, thereby, our trip.

That gave me a lot of time to think on these matters, especially

on Christmas Eve, when I was helping fill bags of sand to hold the

luminarias with which we greet Christmas visitors to our

neighborhood. It occurred to me as I did this mindless work that the

passengers who were killed on the four flights on that fateful

September day and those who lost their lives in the Twin Towers were

likely engaged in similar menial tasks the day before with no

foreboding of what was to happen to them. That reflection gave the

warnings that accompanied the cancellation of our flight a special

urgency. If the people who died had been warned, most of them would

probably be alive today. Thus for us to ignore the warnings we were

receiving seemed a bad reading of the odds.

But we couldn’t sit home and brood about what we were missing, so

we took another trip, a car trip, with good friends Joe and Mary

Robinson of Newport Beach, who were going to accompany us to France.

We drove to San Francisco and the Napa Valley wine country and had a

fine time once we let go of France. The wind and driving rain we

encountered felt benign against the daily newspaper reports about

more canceled flights and chaotic airports. And we got to watch the

Rose Bowl game, which is about the only thing I would have missed in

France.

In retrospect, now that it has touched me directly, I have a great

deal more awareness that a small group of determined terrorists with

a contempt for human life -- including their own -- can dictate the

terms of the way we live and force us to adjust to them. As the

British transport secretary told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “I

think the threat we now face is likely to endure for many years.”

So we have to learn how to deal with it. Anger and increasingly

restrictive security aren’t nearly enough. We also need to identify

root causes and address them in equal partnership with the other

nations of our world threatened by terrorists. The events of the past

few weeks should make it clear to us that fighting terrorism, not

preemptive wars, are where our national focus belongs, and we must

return there as soon as possible. Working in concert with other

threatened nations, we may well be able to isolate the terrorists to

the point where they have nowhere to turn for haven or support.

Meanwhile, we can try to reduce the odds in our own thinking that

allow fear to dictate our travel decisions. I like the passenger

interviewed at LAX during the holidays who said, “I travel quite a

bit, and I refuse to be terrorized by it. There’s nothing I’m going

to change unless there’s a clear and present danger to me or my

family.”

On Christmas Day on Air France, that was the decision we faced.

Maybe we should have toughed it out, but the odds suggested

otherwise. Next time will be a whole new ball game.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.