Travelers’ Philosophies Fly in the Face of Fears

You have tickets to fly out of Los Angeles International Airport in the early days of the Unabomber’s coy countdown to disaster.

What do you do?

You get on the plane.

Not because you’re a hero, but because this is 1995, you live in America, you can rationalize anything, and your threshold for violence is very, very high.

“I was in an automobile accident two years ago,” said a tired Lynn Dantzler as he waited Wednesday night for a flight to South Carolina that never seemed to come. “ That’s the kind of thing that makes you think life’s pretty fragile. You’re actually pretty safe when you get on an airplane.”

A pause. Brief reconsideration. “Except if there’s a crazy man.”

These days, there is a crazy man, and his specter has taken over California’s busiest airport. It is at the Mutual of Omaha counter where Evelyn Holmes, a self-described “praying person,” sells travel insurance and thinks about death.

“It’s times like these I wish I didn’t work here,” said Holmes, who usually sells one policy per shift but has already sold nine on this one and still has three hours to go, hawking up to $500,000 in coverage for a mere $16.65.

The Unabomber haunts Flight 358 to Denver, where flight attendant Terry Field of Huntington Beach counts the United Airlines takeoffs, thinks about how many other jets fly out of the bustling airport each day, does a little mental math and decides she is as safe as a person can expect to be.

“I just don’t really think about it,” she said late Wednesday night, coming to terms with terrorism in a darkened plane 37,000 feet above Las Vegas. “I keep my bags with me, keep my eyes open, hope for the best. Or pray.”

And there’s the Unabomber on Flight 39 from Denver back to Los Angeles on Thursday morning, where anti-gang consultant Paul Cardenas talks about choosing a positive attitude, about not letting possible violence stop him from living. After all, he says, he has seen so much of the real thing before.

“I grew up and saw people killed in front of me in L.A.,” said Cardenas, frightened by the bomb threat but headed for the airport anyway. “It’s always shocking.”

Unabomber is in the waiting area for the United Express flight from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. But Stephanie Crossland, 16, isn’t paying much attention.

“I didn’t know much about [the bomb threat],” she said, curled in the closest thing to a fetal position a person can attain while sitting on an airport bench and wearing Doc Martens. “I was kidnaped a week and a half ago [by a family friend who was later apprehended]. I’m on my way home. It’s been a trippy day.”

Unabomber’s widely disseminated threat to “blow up an airliner out of Los Angeles International Airport” unleashed furious security measures and a stream of fatalism the likes of which LAX had not seen in years.

Flights were delayed, photo identification was required during most check-in procedures, and, at the United terminal, the ranks of security personnel scanning prospective passengers swelled remarkably.

Cindy Sullivan had spent most of Wednesday trying to get from Honolulu to Denver to visit her son, whom she had not seen since Christmas. She was in a plane when the news broke and in the airport for the bulk of the afternoon. She did not know of the potential for danger until 7:30 p.m. when a reporter told her.

“I have noticed a lot of security,” Sullivan said ruefully. “And I’m sorry, but I assumed it was normal for L.A. I didn’t think twice about it. . . . I’m from San Diego originally, but you always think about L.A. as being a separate country.”

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Lori Schuster of Fountain Valley, a flight attendant on Wednesday night’s run from Los Angeles to Denver, wove herself a little web of safety that was one part faith in airline security and one part faith in the fuzziness of the threatening letter the Unabomber had sent to the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s so vague, the bomb threat,” she said hopefully. “There’s no specific flight.”

But then she learned of the Unabomber’s second missive, mailed to the New York Times and disseminated while she was airborne. Never mind, the bomber said. It was just a ruse, he said. Just wanted you to remember me.

Said Schuster: “Now this makes me leery.”

But why wasn’t she more worried in the first place, after a known killer in effect targeted her very place of business, shouting to the world that he was going to put a bomb on a Los Angeles flight--maybe even the one she was on at that moment?

“You really can’t think about that,” she said with resignation. “You have to go to work.”

Harvey Milkman, psychologist, author and professor at Metropolitan State College in Denver, had ample time to talk about threats and violence and the psyche, about why Schuster showed up for work this week feeling at least sort of protected and protectable.

Milkman, en route to Australia for a conference on high-risk youths, was stuck in a 747 winging its way to a Los Angeles stopover Thursday morning. With Johnny Carson reruns on the video screen to his front and an inconsolable toddler to his rear, Milkman turned to his cross-aisle neighbors for civilized early morning chat.

“So,” he said cheerily after inquiring about their destinations, “we’re flying right into the hands of the Unabomber. . . . I grew up in New York. You ever have a bomb threat in the schools? We used to have things like that. . . . They gonna serve breakfast on this flight?”

After breakfast came the explanation: A terrorist and his threats, posited Milkman, are “part of the average expectable environment” and therefore not a threat to that environment. It’s normal, it’s life, it’s ours. Americans feel like they can be protected and put faith in heightened security measures such as the ones so visible this week, he said. And while they do believe in random violence, they do not believe in forecasted violence like the Unabomber’s countdown for the airport. So far, “it just does not compute.”

Besides, he said, part sarcastic, part hopeful, “our karma is so positive this can’t affect us .”