CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The 11th of September, 2023, will mark 22 years since a day of unprecedented loss and suffering in the history of the United States Of America.
The 9/11 Attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Centre will live on forever as a moment that caused a cataclysmic shift in the role America plays in the world. This act of terrorism on home soil was perhaps the first time most US Citizens felt vulnerable to outside forces since the Pearl Harbour bombings.
Overnight, the world we knew changed forever. Over two decades later, we still see the ripple effects – from the two major wars that America rallied the rest of the world into, to the fervid islamophobia that remains visible in Western politics and media.
In Australia, we too experienced this shift. Suddenly, a Swiss Army pocket knife was enough for an ordinary citizen to be detained by airport security staff.
We’ve seen the return of ultra-nationalist populism with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and civil unrest with the 2005 Cronulla Riots and the right-wing politicisation of Australia Day.
Religious dress has also become an divisive issue of that has caused great debate – as head scarves and turbans now attract vitriolic slurs and racial profiling at a rate we could’ve never imagine prior to these events.
As many of us assumed while watching the vision of the towers come down all those years ago. Our lives have never been the same again.
However, the most notable and frustrating change in the average Australian’s day-to-day life is the fact that still, in 2023, grown men must endure the gruelling task of unzipping their fly and wrangling the wanger with one hand at the airport urinal.
The lingering suspicions that surround unattended luggage in airports and train stations now means any bloke travelling with a duffle bag or a briefcase has no option but to hit the little boys with it on their person.
Even if it has nothing valuable or dangerous within, unattended luggage is still considered to be a security risk at the airport, and, therefore, a bag left unattended, even for a short time, will trigger a security alert when it is detected by the airport staff.
This has caused two decades of silent suffering from Australian men, who have no interest in letting their baggage sit on the unsanitised tiles of a public bathroom – regardless of whether they are inside a cubicle or not.
Because of this generations of blokes who like to travel light are now well verse in the Tetris-like skills required to unfurl their manhood, untie their belts and in some cruel cases – unbutton their jeans – with one hand, while also making sure to not accidentally cop a bit of sidespray from the brotherhood lined up next to them.
