Observation on air travel and National Security, 8/22:

Lines, short waits at TSA security check points. The area where some passengers are pulled aside seemed busy with agents digging through luggage and scanning them with metal detectors. At about 6 a.m., a tall, Arab-looking male and, separately, a heavyset, middle-age white woman were taken aside for additional questions and searches.

Nobody was complaining.

You can't tell who is an air marshall, but one mental game that you can play before you board is to guess "Who's The Air Marshall?" You don't know for sure, who they are, but you know they're there.

The six-hour flight was uneventful.

Pre-Sept. 11, there were complaints about security lines. There were complaints about additional passenger searches. There was almost a 100 percent chance your flight had no air marshall.

If there's another Sept. 11-scale attack, it's a lot less likely that it will happen using commercial aircraft.

But people who should know think attitudes still haven't changed enough. Writes Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog: "But I most worry about Americans going soft - about our taking the lack of attacks here for granted, and forgetting that al Qaeda took 7 years between attacks on the WTC."

It was common to hear folks say, in the days after 9/11, "The World has changed forever..." Or, "This is a new kind of war." Or, "We should have the missiles in the air right now." (Remember how much impatience there was, in the days after 9/11, that we hadn't initiated military action within the first couple of days?)

Now, we have people who downplay the threats America faces, and who are consumed - obsessed - with body counts in Iraq.

Three thousand lives on Sept. 11? Those same people never mention them.

But the fact is this: Those folks are in a minority.

The question is: Will they remain so?