Before the Jihad, travel was easy. Before the Jihad, “jihad” meant holy war, but terrorists and the media changed that. Muslims had to come up with another word for holy war, afterwards. After-word.

In the old days, travel was easy. That was before newguilds were established or traffic was understood, back when people carried separate cellphones and personal computers.

They had all sorts of little devices hanging from their belts, but they didn’t have air travel restrictions. They could book their whole trip online, use electronic tickets, carry everything with them, and arrive just a few hours ahead of takeoff to make their planes.

It was easy then, often cheap, always popular. People from developed nations traveled all the time. The planet was wrapped like a golfball in airline routes; con-trails wreathed it like rings. Culture coursed. Commerce flourished. Viruses were transmitted. Terrorists acted.

Amazed afterwards at how obvious it was, it took the genius of Abner Abeneski to observe that neither terrorism nor disease could spread without travel. And it took the forcefulness of Capt. Powell to actually shut travel down.

The Jihad started in 2012. Within a year easy travel was a nostalgic memory. At first everyone declared the spirited intention to move and trade like before. Anything less would “let the terrorists win.” But the business-as-usual plan was like trying to stay friends after a romantic breakup. The participants have the sincerest intentions, but a process is initiated, a process which must proceed in its own inexorable time, eroding intentions and reshaping attitudes, until what results, the gradual complete estrangement, is perfectly natural and retrospectively obvious. In the same way, although everyone vowed to keep on keeping on, folks tended to stay in their communities because it was too much hassle to move around. Their communities began to resemble villages. There was a measurable improvement in security.

The problem was, novelty went down as security went up. It sank along with travel. There weren’t many visitors, and there wasn’t much news. Those conditions, along with a general fear of terrorist acts, led to a provincial distrust of strangers and of anyone who looked or acted differently. Nonconformity was not well tolerated.

Everything might have devolved with blissful ignorance if it weren’t for the transition group. If only there had been some adjacent wilderness area that people could inhabit for a generation, civilization might have made the shift and secured the advantages of a cozy feudal society. But the late adolescents were present. Most of them were caught up in the indignation and carried by the tide of fervent nationalism, but some paid attention. Theirs is the age most likely to attend, grown out of the pretense of childhood and not yet sheltering under the nostalgia of maturity. Some of the twentyish actually shake their heads, look up and around, point and say: “But see here: This makes no sense!”