Today’s TED shows the story of creating the 9/11 Memorial Museum at ground zero in New York City. It’s an interesting story with some short videos from a future documentary on the topic. Very interesting story on how museums are created and the stories they tell. Also helps put 9/11 into perspective.
After writing about my flight on 9/11 yesterday, I wanted to share the latter part of my day. Once I arrived back in North Carolina, my community hosted a program to remember the 10th Anniversary of 9/11. My Resident Advisor staff asked residents who lived in our community to come out wearing red, white and blue and we created a human flag. We plan to sell the picture with all of the proceeds going to the NYPD and NYFD! It was great to see so many people come out to the event and commemorate a day the changed all of our lives forever!
I was up in Pennsylvania this past weekend for the Penn State football game, and it needed to be a really quick trip. Because of the quick turnaround I made the decision to fly, and my return trip ended up occurring on September 11th. It was an interesting day to be in the air, especially because of the “credible threats” since it was the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Thankfully it was an uneventful day for the country, but as I was preparing to fly I had several reflections on the day.
I can honestly say I love flying! While it has become considerably more of a hassle since I was younger, I still get excited every time I go to an airport. The idea that soon I will be in a completely different part of the world in such a short time, the idea that everyone I am currently in the airport with will within a few hours be scattered far and wide across the globe, and I always get the funniest giggle thinking about a hundred people sitting in a little metal tube flying extremely fast through the air. Even though we have to go through such a hassle to fly, those things always make me smile!
One of the biggest themes that came up for me on my 9/11 flight was the idea of trust. While I understand the basic physics of how a plane gets in the air and stays there, I really have no clue how to fly a plane. I have no idea how it works, what a pilot goes through, and what you would need to do in the event of an emergency. Those thoughts just reminded me how much trust we put into a person we do not even know. We trust the pilot knows what he/she is doing, that he/she will keep our lives safe, and in the event of an emergency he/she will be able to appropriately handle the situation to bring us through. While trust is a thing we work to build over a longer period of time in the real world, we pretty quickly put all of our trust in this unknown individual.
We also have a lot of trust in the system of flying, which is extremely complex. I will be the first one to say I do not want to go through a body scanner machine, and the first time I didn’t, but then decided it was not worth the pat down, airport security has kept us safe since 9/11. On top of security there is a whole system of machines and people powering our safety in the air, from the air traffic controllers, to the flight attendants, to the people at the gate, all making our trip happen. I give so much respect to flight attendants, they are the first line of defense while working in an immediate and direct costumer service situation at all times. An airplane is not like a restaurant or a bar where the costumer can decide to leave or the owner can throw you out, even though I am sure they sometimes want to give a passenger or two a parachute.
Overall, the whole system of flying is built on trust. Something we need to work on in a stronger level in the real world. Currently we live in such a high stress world with strongly divided viewpoints. In politics there is no trust for what the other guy is doing, in the economy there is no trust for companies, the government, other countries, the stock market, it’s a divisive, get all you can for yourself attitude. While I know all of our problems will not be solved by adding a bit of trust, I think it would move us much further along than the current configuration. Trust is integral to an improv team, once you play with people for a long time and trust is built the group mind takes over. You know what another people aisthinking, the scenes they are building, and can almost finish each other’s sentences, and the improv produced definitely goes to another level. So maybe the only thing we can afford right now as a country is to trust each other a little bit more, and maybe the productivity of dealing with all of these problems will increase.
