Wings clipped and living on prayer in a born-again US

By Paul Sheehan

This is what Qantas doesn’t tell you about travelling to United States, and probably won’t tell you: when you arrive there, especially if you arrive in the major entry port of Los Angeles, you have a high probability of being kept by customs and immigration for two hours after arrival.

You will wait until all the Americans have been processed. You will wait in lines that snake for hundreds of metres. You will wait at immigration. You will wait at the baggage claim. You will wait at customs.

If you are flying onwards, you will wait again. If you made a tight connection – anything under 2 hours – you will miss your onward flight. Travelling on a domestic flight, you will have a good chance of being temporarily detained, asked to remove your shoes and frisked.

In other words, the terrorist movement has already won this particular war. It has gained the respect of fear. It is in the minds of the vast and growing US security bureaucracy, and therefore in the minds of anyone who has to catch a plane.

Qantas, like everyone else, will have to renavigate this America and find ways to adapt, perhaps by adjusting its arrival times or offering a financial inducement to the US Government to provide more agents and modify its new policy of courteous contempt. But navigating this high-alert America will require adaptation by more than just Qantas.

Millions of Americans are also having to adapt to changes which have reached a critical mass and now have a self-reinforcing momentum.

The biggest change is the loss of control of the American political and social agenda by secular liberalism. From the advent of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, it grew to dominate policy-making through the courts, the bureaucracy, academia and the media.

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