Sometimes I wonder if the price of security has not become too high and if we have simply decided to pay it, whatever it is.

It’s uncertain that by enchaining and locking ourselves inside the boundaries of our society we can be really fully protected from the enemies.

What is certain, on the other hand, is that it causes us to lose a fundamental portion of our personal freedom.

Electronic devices in airports are ready to explore every corner not only of our luggage,
but also of our body, our stomachs.

Ultra sophisticated sounders can peep under our clothes, getting rid of what remains of our underwear on a kind of aseptic screen.

We have to give up that freedom of travelling, which allowed us to take a plane at the last minute.

We have to plan and accept the inevitable waste of a certain number of hours in those rather
uncomfortable no man’s land areas which airports have become.

We have to ration the content of our bottles of shampoo.

We have to forget eyebrow tweezers and nail clippers.

So what? Many might say– it’s necessary do defend oneself from menaces.

Freud said that mankind has always bartered a freer quality of life in exchange of a safer life.

But this barter has a very expensive price. Security is expensive, financially, not only from the point of view of the limitation of personal freedom.

We may be perhaps a little too conditioned by fears, which – unluckily - in many cases are well grounded, but there is always the other side of the coin, which is represented by a loss of solidarity.

There is no place for solidarity in a social context, when an atmosphere of suspicion begins to pervade.
Consciously or unconsciously we have started distrusting others, the strangers, the unknown, pre-supposing them to be potential enemies.

Is there any alternative to padlocks and chains?

Maybe to find it we should try to overcome two common stereotypes and to start thinking that terrorism is not the only menace to our security and it’s not possible to clear all risks.

Terrorism exists and it must be firmly faced, but there are many people who become victims as a result of other dangers, such as car accidents, to mention one.

In the USA there are more than 3000 car accident victims every month, but there still remains a lack of policy or action to impose restrictive controls and severe limits on all drivers,
to force them to change radically their habits.

Probably it’s because that while there is a growing, and at times a little neurotic worry about airlines safety, but the same thought is not given to highway safety.

I suppose soon we’ll be scanned also before boarding a train.

We live in a society of risk.

It’s absurd to conceive life without risks.

Demands for a risk-free society will lead to accepting the extreme sacrifice of the remains of our individual freedom.

Security without conditions is one of the principles of tyranny.

If we lock ourselves into our own limited space and we put bars to all our windows to keep the danger away, one day we might realize that life has gone elsewhere, while we are trapped inside our own prison, which is not necessarily very safe either.