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Every day at your airport checkpoints, you screen thousands of passengers for objects that could conceivably be used as a weapons. If you find one, you confiscate it, and the unfortunate traveler continues on her way, cupcakeless but no longer a threat to national security.

You’re also looking for explosives, which is understandable. If you found a live bomb — I mean, not that you ever have — but if you did, well, that would clearly be one terrorist caught and many lives saved, right? That is, assuming you actually remembered to do something about it, of course. But everybody makes mistakes and I won’t blame you for that. I’m sure someday you’ll stop being a complete waste of money. Really, we’re all pulling for you.

But here’s my question. Suppose I, a normal taxpaying non-terrorist type guy, were to bring through a checkpoint something relatively harmless but still against the rules: not a bomb but, say, a pocketknife. You’re going to take that away from me, right? But why? If I’m not a terrorist, how is it dangerous for me to have a four-inch folding knife in my trousers? It’s staying there until well after we land, unless Amazon Prime really improves. Or do you think I might suddenly decide to abort my vacation, abandon my family, and throw my life away in a fit of deranged violence when the captain interrupts the in-flight Mad About You for the seventh time to announce that one of the shittier Great Lakes is on the other side of the plane? Right when Murray the dog is about to make Paul Reiser get a little bit annoyed?

Of course not, because you are an organization of highly intelligent cupcake confiscators. The only logical reason for you to take my knife from me is that you think I’m a terrorist. You’ll smile and shake your head at the dopey terrorist, and you’ll go tsk tsk, and then you’ll let me through to board my flight.

So, TSA, answer me this: why are you allowing suspected terrorists onto planes?

We’re enjoying a resurgence of the conservative talking point claiming that president Obama overuses first-person-singular pronouns, and that this is a reflection of his egotism and self-centeredness. Allegedly, the address he gave to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden was filled with “I”s and “me”s and “my”s. So vain!

Except, as Language Log’s Mark Liberman points out:

There are two problems with this meme. The first problem is that frequency of FPS pronoun use is not in fact correlated with the personality traits that they associate with it (and with Obama). (…) The second problem is that Obama’s empirical frequency of FPSP use is in fact on the low side, when you compare his speeches, press conferences, interviews, etc. to similar performances by other recent presidents.

Unsurprisingly, two ways to be wrong about an issue don’t make a right.

I slept through the news last night. I didn’t find out until I got up at 4:30am. My first emotion about it was something close to closure. 

Then I read the news and I saw the pictures of celebrations and I read through jbowes’ tumblr and what I saw mostly horrified me.

This isn’t an NBA championship. We didn’t win anything. Yet, there are people gathering by the hundreds if not thousands, waving flags, holding up hastily drawn signs and chanting “USA! USA!”

We didn’t win anything.

We lost almost 3,000 people on 9/11. We’ve lost over 5,000 soldiers in the wars that followed - and are still being fought - in both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

We didn’t win anything.

In my mind, this should be a quiet, somber occasion, one where we reflect on what this man took from us with terrorism and what he took from us in the ten years after. I’m not saying anyone is wrong for feeling joy over his death. But I will put myself out there and say that running around with a flag draped around you shouting “USA! USA!” is not really a dignified reaction. In fact, this sort of thing? It’s pretty ugly.

I can’t tell you exactly what about it is making my stomach churn or making me shake my head in disbelief. Maybe it’s the fact that ten years and 8,000 deaths later, the celebration in honor of the death of the man who was the catapult to those deaths should be somewhat muted, and not an explosion of jingoism.

I knew people who died on September 11, 2001. I went to funerals and memorial services. Still, I can’t find it in me to feel joyous about any of this. I can’t bring myself to raise a fist in the year and shout “Fuck yea, America!” I can’t bring myself to high-five anyone. I can thank the soldiers that worked hard to capture the man responsible for so much terror and death. I can feel a small sense of closure. But not an ending. Not a finality. And certainly, I can not feel a need to celebrate any of it.

We did not win anything. This is not a game. This is not a sport. This is not a championship. We’ve lost too much to ever, ever feel like we came out winners, to ever feel like victory is ours.

We did not win.

Osama bin Laden is finally dead.

But we did not win a damn thing.