The new normal

The moment I saw CNN reports on passengers at London’s Heathrow Airport being given zip-lock bags for their carry-on belongings, I texted a friend: "You’re looking at the future of travel."

Even as airlines and aircraft manufacturers are scrambling to outdo each other in offering the most luxurious way to travel, security measures are stripping it to its bare essentials. Forget Givenchy sleeper suits in your fully-extendable beds in first class – you’re still carrying your Cartier wallet in a ziplock bag like you’re a contestant on Amazing Race whose backpack is taken away and you’re given a garbage bag as replacement on a non-elimination leg.

This, my friends, is "the new normal" and you’d better get used to it. You can’t bring your duty-free chocolates onboard if you’re on your way to the US, you can’t bring your own bottled water or juice, not even your toothpaste and moisturizer – the horror! the horror! of bad breath and dry skin on a long haul – long lines at the airport, and obsessive-paranoid checking of luggage.

It reminds me of a trip to the US that I took with fellow journalists in 2001, a few months after 9/11 happened, and the issue of racial profiling at airports was being debated hotly. A female colleague was pulled out of our line on four separate occasions, ostensibly as part of "random checks." So we asked a security officer how they determined which passenger to screen and he said it was the "position" in line, for instance, every 50th or 20th passenger is asked to open his hand-carry luggage for further checks.

Right. And I’m Queen Elizabeth.

That this colleague was chosen four times at random on one trip was as probable as her winning the lottery – twice.

It happened again in Frankfurt, Germany, the following year. I was traveling with an Indonesian journalist. We were in transit and he was stopped for further screening after we had landed and, while we were killing time waiting for our flights back to Asia, he was asked twice by security personnel walking around the terminal if he was getting off Frankfurt. He said, no, he was on his way to Jakarta. What broke my heart was his apparent ignorance of why he was being asked all these questions. He didn’t look Chinese or Japanese enough to be a rich Asian tourist; he looked Indonesian and a Moslem (though he was a Christian).

It was the new normal back in 2002. Today, it’s just a matter of routine. We’re all used to it. We don’t put up a fight, we don’t question motives or reasons. Terrorism has changed the world and no matter how people very bravely say on TV, "Well, we’re not going to let terrorists change the way we live," they already have changed the way we live – we’re just too busy waiting in line to notice it.

The new normal in 2003, of course, was being stopped at airports out of Asia for being and looking Asian, and therefore you had a 99 percent chance of being infected with SARS. To an outsider, it didn’t matter which country in Asia you came from, or if you slept with your livestock – or if you had livestock at all. SARS, after all, had brought untold personal tragedy to the rest of the world, virtually halting tourism to affected countries, and for travelers it meant having to fill out a questionnaire that asked if you had had diarrhea in the past week.

I was in Cleveland, Ohio, waiting for a friend outside a mall when a group of white teenagers looked at me and started faking sneezes. The mature thing to do, of course, was to walk away, chalk it up to bad "Cleveland rocks" experience. Being me, I faked back a sneeze and started groping my neck as if to check my temperature, and then walked away.

And finally, another travel story of dumb luck and being at the wrong place at the wrong time. In Frankfurt, still waiting for our flight back to Asia, I met a Pinoy architect based in Saudi Arabia. He spoke Bahasa, too, since he had worked in Indonesia, which impressed our fellow journalist. Anyway, this Pinoy – really learned, cultured, and a professional – was assigned by his Saudi company to work on a project in Germany, not in Frankfurt but in some backwater hick town. He told us that when the construction workers saw that he was brown and short (in short, Asian) – and they had to take orders from him – they walked out and refused to work on the project. The company had to hire a white dude to act as the boss even though he would still be taking directions from the Pinoy.

It didn’t end there. The hotel where he was billeted was the venue of a Neo Nazi convention – you know, skinheads who think you don’t have a right to live if you’re not part of the Aryan race. So the manager advised him that for his own safety, he should take all his meals in his room instead of the hotel restaurant, and be as inconspicuous as possible.

His reaction? He was scared, of course. But when we were talking to him at the airport. He was already laughing at the entire experience.

Just one of those unpleasant incidents in life: a new normal.

Last May, when I interviewed Matt Coughlin of US-Visit, US Department of Homeland Security, he said the two-fingerprint standard that visitors go through in securing a visa and upon arrival in the US will soon be changed. The State Department is doing tests in countries like Saudi Arabia and El Salvador for a 10-finger standard.

"Do you know what latent prints are?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "We watch CSI."

"With 10 fingerprints, it would be hard to get away with an assumed identity."

You can bet the lines are going to get looonger at America’s ports of entry.

The term "the new normal" sounds scary and it is, even when it has nothing to do with racial discrimination or travel or terrorism. Think of all the changes the world has gone through in the past 30 years alone, forcing our lazy asses to get with the program or be the only ones who think a Blackberry is a red berry gone sour.

For so long, I held on to my Wordstar 4, single-diskette software, refusing to learn Windows – or even WordPerfect. When I bought my first cell phone, I ignorantly thought I would hold on to it for years and not be like one of those poor bastards who blew their money on newer models or upped their postpaid plans to get free new phones every so often. Or even cable TV – who would have thought we would have 24-hour programming that show nothing but movies, news and more nonsense? Or pet robots, which seems to be the most pointless invention ever made to ease loneliness. Hello, get a real dog or a goldfish?.

Or the Internet. How can we even begin to describe how the Internet has changed the world, the way we learn, educate, communicate and ruin each other’s lives? Suffice it to say, as humorist David Sedaris put it, once you put something out on the Internet it stays there forever, which is why he hates it. So, even in your drunkest-passed-out-smashed moment, don’t ever ever think of uploading those racy photos or videos you made with an ex-lover.

Or even in our personal lives: how things we thought would never come have become the new normal. Spouses, babies, deaths – the no-turning-back things in life. Or think of the first time somebody addressed you with a "po," shocking your knickers out of your skirt. You act like a six-year-old, but you’re actually – dear God, how many candles were on your last birthday cake?

A friend of mine in his 20s cannot and will not address me by my first name. He always precedes it with a "Miss," as if I was a fast food employee asking him if he wanted fries with his burger. He also asked me once what you call that thingie that plays vinyls, you know, those big-ass albums before audio CDs became the new normal. I thought he meant the old old word, so I said, "the phonograph?" It didn’t occur to me that he meant "turntable" or that we were a generation apart.

And so these are the new normal in our lives. We winged the recordable VHS (while watching another channel), Internet telephony, podcasting and predictive texting; we’ve even accepted that text is now a verb, and the plural of e-mail comes with an S.

We sure as hell can wing traveling with zip-lock bags.