I submitted again today. It’s really the only choice you have if you want to travel on the commercial airlines. Like sheep being led to the slaughter, we line up and submit to searches that would make a Stalinist or a Nazi proud.
We do it without complaining, though my contempt shows clearly on my face as I submit. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before I’m pulled into some room for daring to be contemptuous of this sort of fascist behavior, daring to question the authority of my government to force its will on me in its never-ending crusade to rid our country of any danger.
Well, strike that last line. They don’t seem to mind certain kinds of danger at all. They seem perfectly willing to cast ever greater numbers of the poor and desolate into the streets, happy to cut the last vestige of health care safety net from those without money, delighted to use tax dollars to fund private schools while allowing schools to fail in the poorest and most bleak corners of our nation.
It’s not really safety they’re after. It’s control.
I understand how, following 9/11, we had an administration and a congress bent on stirring fear in us, so we’d allow them to impose ever-increasing authoritarian controls over us, and get us to allow them to trounce all over our sacred Bill of Rights. In that soup of fear and growing authoritarianism, we gleefully allowed them to create the TSA – a gang of thugs who search and probe every crevice of our privacy whenever we enter an airport.
I endured the probing and ever increasing authoritarianism. My slightest whimpers at the offenses brought lighthearted comments from my fellow travelers. “I’m just happy they’re protecting us from terroristsâ€, or “I don’t have anything to hide – I’m glad their searching us allâ€. I could only hope that we would evolve past these thugs we’d elected, and get back to a sane respect for our Bill of Rights. Surely, We The People would revolt against this destruction of our Freedoms and Rights, right?
We don’t seem to care.
Today, as I made my way through the lines of gestapo and the strip-search machines, I watched a wretched site. I shouldn’t have watched, but I did.
A young woman – maybe 30 or 35 – had apparently failed the strip-search machine. In my case, I’d been frisked because I left a dollar bill in my pocket. Really, their machine could see the dollar bill in my pocket, and after I took it out, I was manhandled and searched to make sure I didn’t have any other offending dollar bills in my pocket.
But back to this young woman. Attractive and innocent, she’d worn a nice dress. A bit clingy – you could very clearly see the contours beneath the dress. Having failed the strip-search machine, she was going to be humiliated in front of all to see. Helga, (the interrogator or searcher – that probably wasn’t her name but could have been…), was having the young woman strike different poses over the yellow foot marks on the pad, while she ran her hands all over looking for the offending dollar bill (or whatever her offense was).
This was the part I shouldn’t have watched. If you wanted to know what was beneath her dress, all you had to do was look at her – she wasn’t hiding anything. If there was a dollar bill tucked into her panties I could have told Helga right where it was – I could see the lines of her panties, and I’m sure I could have seen the outline of a dollar tucked in there.
The poor girl was humiliated. Helga was feeling her up in public, and she was supposed to feel grateful that we were somehow more secure from bad guys as a result.
I was ashamed. I couldn’t continue to watch, and made sounds of disapproval and disgust as I passed Helga. Fortunately for me, Helga had her hands full, and couldn’t call gestapo buddies to haul me to the interrogation room.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Go out on the web and search for accounts of folks who’ve had similar or worst experiences, such as the woman who was felt-up and forced to remove her breast prosthetic.
Fellow Americans, when will we all begin to express our disgust at this behavior, rather than continuing to condone it with our silence? We have a budget crisis. How about this – abolish the TSA to save a few hundred billion?
Look, I have no doubt our Nazi style searches at airports make it harder for hijackers to steal airplanes and kill people. But let’s face it, our government loves to cozy up to terrorists like the tobacco industry and big pharma, and big tobacco and big pharma are absolutely killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with the legislation they buy in Congress, yet we do nothing to protect Americans from them. Somehow though, we’re happy to let these idiots in congress spend hundreds of billions and piss our liberty down the toilet in the name of eliminating some risk to airline traffic.
In our sacred Bill of Rights is the 4th Amendment – protecting us from unreasonable search by our government. It was meant to check and stop the power of government to use “security” as a cover for total control. It was meant to force the government to prove that they have some reason to believe that you’re committing a crime or doing something illegal before they’re able to search you in any way.
Really – look it up – it’s one of the founding principles of our nation. When we created the TSA, the federal government slapped the Bill of Rights in the face, threw it in the gutter, then turned to We The People and dared us to say anything about it or do anything to stop them.
When will we say something?
Life is dangerous. Bad guys exist, and do bad things. Hitler did a great job of making his country safer from outside terrorists, but the price was high. I’m one American who’s not willing to pay for a little security with the liberty that so many good Americans have died to preserve.
Abolish the TSA.
This quote sums it up: “I’m one American who’s not willing to pay for a little security with the liberty that so many good Americans have died to preserve.”
I find it hard to believe the ABC news article’s statistics, “Americans by a 2-to-1 margin support the use of naked image full-body x-ray scanners in airport security lines…” I can’t be the minority in my strong disagreement with the use of privacy raping technology.
Thank you for your interesting and thought provoking posts, Neil.
I found that astounding as well Bradley. In my case, I travel often, so I watch this sickening behavior often. If all Americans had to submit to the gestapo for these searches on a regular basis, I wonder if attitudes would change?
Personally, I really think that the constant far-right blaring of the press telling us we should be very very afraid has conditioned us to be willing to let the government do whatever they want. We’ve surrendered our Bill of Rights. Our only hope is that enough people call attention to the travesty that we start to wake up and take our nation back from those who would drop us off the cliff of fear into the oblivion of fascism.
Thanks for the comment!
This quote sums it up: “I’m one American who’s not willing to pay for a little security with the liberty that so many good Americans have died to preserve.”
I find it hard to believe the ABC news article’s statistics, “Americans by a 2-to-1 margin support the use of naked image full-body x-ray scanners in airport security lines…” I can’t be the minority in my strong disagreement with the use of privacy raping technology.
Thank you for your interesting and thought provoking posts, Neil.
I found that astounding as well Bradley. In my case, I travel often, so I watch this sickening behavior often. If all Americans had to submit to the gestapo for these searches on a regular basis, I wonder if attitudes would change?
Personally, I really think that the constant far-right blaring of the press telling us we should be very very afraid has conditioned us to be willing to let the government do whatever they want. We’ve surrendered our Bill of Rights. Our only hope is that enough people call attention to the travesty that we start to wake up and take our nation back from those who would drop us off the cliff of fear into the oblivion of fascism.
Thanks for the comment!