Fear And Trembling On The Journey

For the past few years I have spent time in Boston's South Station waiting for either the commuter train home or an Amtrak train to New York.  Hanging out in the grand space that has been created from the original train station used to have a kind of festival atmosphere until the authorities who manage Amtrak decided to get in on the trend to reposition post 9/11 America as a place fraught with incipient terrorism just waiting to be unmasked and apprehended.  While high up in the station are giant screens used by advertisers to make one tiresome shill after another, much lower down and more immediately connecting with the waiting throng are screens showing variations on the now ubiquitous "If you see something, say something."  There are scenes of non suspecting waiting passengers having their luggage stolen from them, and someone just like you alerting them to their loss.  There is a young girl on the train noting a man entering and putting a package overhead and then leaving the train, whereupon she puts two and two together and talks to a "uniformed member of the staff."  In an effort to cozy up to us there are interviews with security officers emphasizing the unseen threats that lurk around the train system, there are interviews with canine officers, showing how dogs are sniffing out the dangers in the luggage, warnings not to pet them.   At one point there is a shot of a young man nonchalantly walking down the center of a railroad track with his buds in his ears, either suicidely stupid or genuinely wanting to end it all--can't imagine a rational person embarking upon that path.  To my surprise as I waited in Penn Station to go to Washington I encountered the same dread and forboding, and coming back Union Station offered the same entertainment.  What a way to sit at and wait for a train, bombarded by views played endless of treachery, mayhem, sinister designs.  It is in such an amusing contrast with air travel where the waiting space has every dreary daytime television talk show imaginable.  Can you imagine sitting waiting for your plane to be called and watching a show of sinister people carrying unlikely luggage, or police apprehending someone doing something questionable.  The airline flying public would freak out.  For some reason riding the rails is for sterner folk who can countenance the prospect of desperate people boarding the train or can well imagine a proper young man walking along ahead of a twenty ton locomotive streaming along at one hundred miles an hour.