AA SLF
You are probably right about my being triggered to make a business decision I should have made a decade ago. It doesn't alter my basic point here, though, that one change has triggered another, and if that happens across a significant number of people there has been a social change.
If you are right, then my earlier decisions were not economically rational, but arose from my emotional - perhaps sentimental - attachment to the USA. The disturbing thing is that the affection that manifested itself in my day to day feelings seems to have been broken, or at least damaged, by the frequency of the unpleasant feelings I now get.
This has happened unconsciously and has crept up on me over the past 18 months. I still visit dear friends and relatives in California, Iowa, Illinois and Massachusetts, but whereas in the past I would trot off to my airline with a sense of excitement, these days I do it with a slight feeling of dread and foreboding, like I was making a dental appointment. And that slight discomfort isn't about terrorism - I visit the Middle East without thinking about it at all - but about the behaviour of American officials towards me.
I don't like this. My friends haven't changed, my relatives haven't changed. But getting to them often (usually) hurts, and being there sometimes hurts. I fight it - in my mind my experience makes me a sort of fifth order terrorist victim. What I struggle with is that while I understand the US response, I also believe that the consequences of it are more damaging than the risk it attempts to ameliorate. My country - New Zealand - has one characteristic in common with pre 9/11 USA, the belief that our geography makes us immune to terrorist attack. I am very much aware that should there be such an attack here the psychological response would likely be very similar. But I think I would still find it ill-considered. And I speak as someone who was physically present close to an IRA mainland British bombing in Manchester. In my view if the USA sacrifices its open society to this threat, then the physical security purchased isn't worth the price, and the terroists have triumphed.