I came to air travel late in life, boarding a mere 4 or 5 jets before 9/11. I know, sad. Which means I have no clear memory of what those glory days were like before the hated TSA came to harass us at our local airports. Hazy at best. Did we keep our shoes on?

You know the crew. The merry band of thousand yard stares who seem to wish they were anywhere else. The ill-fitting uniforms, the joyless barks of “Next!”, herding cattle single file, demanding empty pockets, our collective dignity carelessly placed next to our carry-ons, concluding with the too intrusive pat-down. An utterly thankless job.

And I gotta say, “I’m here for it.”

Commercial air travel is so routine and ridiculously safe that the odds of me spilling coffee on my laptop as I peck away at this post are astronomically higher than a plane falling out of the sky this decade. Don’t believe me? Google “How many commercial jets are in American airspace right now?” The answer I got was 5,000. Over the course of an average day, 50,000. The last time there was an air disaster in our skies? 2009! Colgan Flight 3407, caused by pilot error and lack of training. 49 dead. Tragic, yes. But 15 years?? What a safety record! I can’t match that simply lowering myself onto a toilet.

To be fair, nearly all of that excellence is due to the design, construction, and maintenance of our commercial fleet. But if the TSA wants to make me feel even a little bit safer through performative inconvenience, who am I to say no?

Long, circuitous lines? BFD. Use the time to imagine that Grandma a couple of lines over might be concealing a small explosive device in that suspiciously oversized bun on the back of her head, or maybe the kid behind me with the noise-canceling headphones staring vacantly into his phone is really programming his fleet of drones to triangulate their missile fire on the air traffic control tower two clicks north of the airport, his finger vacillating between “Execute” and “No Joy.” I mean, what else am I going to do? Complain? It’s not a personal problem to bitch about. We’re all in the same herd. And rest easy, TSA will nail Grandma and Liam (or Noah or Aiden) before they put their shoes back on.

Perhaps because my frequent flying has come only in the last ten years do I see air travel for what it really is, a bona fide miracle. I’m dropped off at some non-descript collection of buildings that appear to have been designed by a team of architects who simply upended a box of mismatched Legos, to then follow one vague sign after another that somehow escorts me to the correct line, ultimately to be sealed into a piece of metal weighing 100 tons that impossibly lifts off the ground and successfully transports me far away from where I began only a few hours earlier. Even da Vinci would have shouted, “Magnifico!”

You wanna get a little too close to my crotch to see if that’s a box cutter in my pocket or if I’m just happy to see you? Have at it. If it prevents the plane from falling out of the sky, I’ll do a strip-tease, just cue the music.

Why all the love for our humorless folks in tight polyester, you may be wondering? Because you and I have loved ones participating in the organized chaos that is Holiday Travel. It’s ill-advised. It’s illogical. It’s nail-biting. And yet somehow it all works. Pour one out for those poor miserable bastards. God love ‘em.

And if you can’t, here’s a little perspective. Most of our long-dead ancestors made the excruciating choice to leave their distant homelands forever, with no prospects and no plan, only a nauseating ticket in steerage that ruthlessly tossed them across an ocean to a foreign land speaking a foreign tongue, where we now comfortably reside.

For that (and dark meat covered in gravy), let’s give thanks.