Surely you must feel safer after you recently read or heard that a Southwest Airlines pilot made an emergency landing to protect his passengers. This was after a passenger lit a cigarette in a bathroom. 

Yes, the pilot aborted a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He landed at San Jose after the smoker and smoking were discovered. There was no suggestion the smoker was touching off a bomb in his shoe. We are left to believe that second-hand smoke — and the breaking of rules — was the horrible problem.

Upon landing, the smoker was handcuffed and marched off to jail. His fellow passengers were placed on other aircraft.

Whew, that was a close call. Imagine how damaged the lungs of those passengers would have been if the guy had lit a cigar? Why, the plane would probably have toppled from the sky.

Maybe like me, you hope Amtrak got the message. I am waiting for the Acela to screech to a halt at Podunkville, New Jersey — after another smoker tries the same dangerous trick. 

Wait for it: “Greyhound passengers stranded in Kookamonga after fanatic lights up during bus trip. Bus being fumigated before EPA will allow it to return to service.” 

Carnival Cruise ship returns to port after cigarette butt discovered in corridor. Passenger tells police she was so upset by discovery she nearly jumped overboard.

Notice to all guests of the hotel: All bedrooms must be evacuated due to the discovery of cigarette ash in a waste basket in one of our rooms. You will be relocated to another hotel during fumigation of this facility.

You get the message.

You should file the Southwest story in the same file as the “lingerie” incident from a few months ago. You remember. On a crowded elevator, a British prof was asked what floor he wanted. He mumbled “Ladies’ lingerie” and all hell broke loose. Other profs were devastated. Some wanted to drum the letch out of academia.

File it with various dispatches from the political-correctness front. For example: A Midwest university’s Inclusive Excellence Center cautions us about mouthing terms like “Soup Nazi.” Because this would mean we minimize the Holocaust. And whoa, dude, don’t you dare say “third world” or “thug” or “lame” or “man up” or “are you deaf?” You would have trod on the sensitivities of various innocents.

The New York Post’s Kyle Smith recently warned us of such political correctness. Don’t let them catch you saying, “blind spot” or “blind alley.” Or “crazy,” “psycho,” or “schizo.” One big university spent thousands warning students to never say something like “I took one look at the exam and wanted to die.” You see, suicidal folks would find this offensive.

As I suggested earlier, you might do best to file all this stuff together. Then bundle up the file and send it off to the Museum of the Absurd. Wait, Don’t go there. The word museum derives from a temple of the Muses. They were all male. Not allowed today. They were probably dirty old men.

Best to burn the file, I guess. And don’t tell anyone. After all, “fire” derives from the German “Feuer.” And that is uncomfortably close to Fuhrer. Which would dump you into the soup. You know, the Nazi Soup. 

In your dilemma you might try to flee to Acapulco, to escape it all. Only to find yourself in San Jose. In a no-smoking zone. 

From Tom…as in Morgan.                 

Tom Morgan writes about political, financial, and other subjects from his home in upstate New York. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com. You can read more of his writing at tomasinmorgan.com

Every so often, I jot down a list of the things that discourage me about our country. There’s the widespread disregard for our core values of tolerance and mutual respect, for instance. Or our declining national optimism. There’s wage stagnation, income inequality, a high poverty rate, failing infrastructure, inadequate health-care coverage, a dysfunctional Congress … You get the idea.

This is not really a list of failings. It’s a to-do list. How do we make progress on it? Well, I’ll tell you: politics.

American politics can be an inefficient, noisy, messy ride. But be careful before you condemn it and its practitioners, because alternatives like a chaotic anarchy or the brutal efficiency of a dictatorship are far worse.

In other words, if we’re going to attack the problems that concern us, we need politics: otherwise, our government would grind to a halt. The institutions of politics — the rule of law, elections, city councils, legislatures, and Congress — are the way we make operational a government of, by, and for the people. They are how we work together.

At its heart, politics is about searching for a remedy to a problem and building support behind that remedy. This is not to say that our system is even close to perfect. The list of things we need to fix is long.

Yet I worry that our disdain for politicians and the howling criticism aimed at our democratic institutions in recent years has so undermined confidence in the system that people have lost their trust in their fellow citizens, their elected representatives, and their institutions — in other words, in the very people, organizations, and core values that can get us out of this mess.

For all its fits and starts, its horse-trading and negotiating, and raw give-and-take, politics is also how we try to provide equal rights, civil liberties, and a fair shot at opportunity for all. Sure, we fall short of the ideal. But in a representative democracy, it’s the mechanism we possess to try to create a more perfect union.

It doesn’t do much good just to talk about the ideals or shared values of America. You also have to try to realize them on the ground, to pull them out of the complicated — and often self-contradictory — mass of popular longings and opinions and translate them into policy and law. For better or worse, politics is how we do this.         

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.