Feeling at risk

It would be fair to say I've hit the ground running. After arriving on Saturday, I put in a full 8-hour day on Sunday and a 14-hour day yesterday. I don't anticipate that schedule will let up anytime soon. That will be OK as soon as I get into a proper sleeping rhythm. For now, though, I'm waking up at 2:30 every morning and pretty much staying awake until my alarm goes off at 6:15. Three to four hours of sleep is just not enough to fill the tank, especially when you don't have time to eat during the day.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain. Keeping busy at work helps keep my mind off other things, like the security situation. I've been to dangerous places before, a number of them more dangerous than here, statistically speaking. But it's called "terrorism" for a reason, and it works. Although terrorist attacks are few, they are spectacularly visible -- and so are the measures taken to ward them off. The terrorist threat is never far from your mind, because it's always in your face.

A fifteen minute drive will take you through about half a dozen police checkpoints. Concrete barricades are strewn like an obstacle course across the road at frequent intervals. When drivers slow down to pick their way through, heavily armed police officers shine flashlights through the windows to see who and what is inside. Pulling up to the office, the car is automatically imprisoned between two rows of metal spikes outside the gate. The trunk and hood are inspected, and a tool like a giant dentist's mirror is used to look at the undercarriage. From there the car pulls inside the gate and drops us off, and we take a long path past a tarpaulin-covered sand barrier about fifteen feet high and as many feet wide, forming a bomb barrier between the wall of the compound and the office building. We pass through a heavy vault door to the security office, where our bags and our persons are manually inspected. Through another bolted vault door is the lobby, past which is the door to the office itself, which can only be accessed by finger print scan. Before even setting foot in the office, I was given a radio, a cell phone, and a memo requesting me to prepare proof of life questions in the event I was abducted.

It's unnerving as hell, and yet somehow people get used to it, after a fashion. Already, I find myself humming the theme song to Get Smart as I pass through level after level of security check. The ubiquitous police bunkers and concrete roadblocks are used for advertising space. "This police bunker brought to you by the fine folks at Sony." Why waste a perfectly good blank slab, right? You certainly have a captive audience. The irony is of course that I am in far more danger of being in a traffic accident than a terrorist attack, but that never crosses my mind when I get in the car. That's what's so horribly brilliant about terrorism. The existence of threat is not nearly as important as the perception of it. This country is completely and utterly terrorized.
As for me, I'm generally ruled by the rational part of my brain that knows the chances of something going wrong are so slim as to barely merit counting (something like 1 in 150 million). Still, it's not a comfortable feeling.