Warning: This is not a humorous post.
I love democracy. I love our constitution. I love the aspects of our country and our culture that allow the many voices to join together for change. I don’t like it when the voices are owned by shortsighted idiots.
We live in a dangerous world. Gone are the good old days of war by the rules. Even a loose set of rules. Thanks to the advances in technology that allow you to read this from anywhere in the world, small groups of unstable people can communicate over vast spaces and wreak their own particular kind of havoc on the unsuspecting.
This brings me to the TSA. I travel through airports fairly regularly and my experience with the TSA workers has been positive. I frankly think they do a very good job in a very difficult situation. I am repeatedly amazed at the stupidity and self-centered attitude of a good percentage of the traveling public. That could be a whole other post. What I’m disgusted with today is the TSA’s caving in on the “pat down” of children. A few over protective, tofu munching, Montessori schooling, touchy feeling mommies don’t want their babies checked out for explosives. Well excuuuuuuse me! Then why don’t you teach the little high self-esteem snot rats to stand still in a scanner! Guess what yoga mommy, air travel is not a constitutionally protected right. It’s a business. I for one would like to know that your precious little baby who’s carrying a big ol’ load in their Pampers, smells from the purried yams he just ate and not the smell of a half-pound of C4!
These pampered crybabies are just aghast that anyone would think that little Princess Poopypants could do anything terrorist related. I agree that she couldn’t because she is a child. However, mommy and daddy and uncle Timothy McVeigh are a different story. Do you think somebody like McVeigh cared that children died in Oklahoma city.
Look at his face. He’s a nice looking boy next door just like every other tourist. If he was next to you in line you’d probably exchange Facebook information and become friends. (Yes, I know he’s dead.)
This also applies to grandma in the wheelchair. C4 would fit nicely in her seat cushion.
So if a nice friendly non-arab looking guy is going through the line with his wiggly kid and the TSA screener would like a closer look, just remember this picture and quit your whining!
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Right on! There is no such thing as being too careful when it comes to preventing the next terrorist attack. The idiots opposed to the patdowns and body scans need to get over it. These procedures are no picnic for the TSA screeners, either.
The new scanners just take a few seconds, and though the first time you do it you might not know what to do, they are not complex or intrusive. The people who are complaining may think they are “protecting their children,” but they would do a better job of protecting if they let the TSA do their job.
Well said. I also think parents should keep their small children on one of those kid leashes in the airport. We did that with our daughter when she was a toddler. Except for a tendency to jerk backwards as she walks now, she has grown up to be fairly well adjusted.
Absolutely on the money. It seemed a bit harsh, but what happened to that elderly woman who was stripped of her soiled Depends was taken in stride by said woman. Her daughter was the one horrified, as anyone could imagine a daughter would be if their elderly, wheel-chair-bound and chronically ill mother was taken away from them to be searched. It was shocking and in many ways embarrassing, but the woman herself understood that it was for her protection and that of citizens in which she rides.
In regard to over-protective parents, I agree that they should be wise to what happens in the airports these days before taking their children flying. I’m so tired of people trying to make everything in the world about them, especially in regard to children. Kids need to learn that there are things in the world that may be unpleasant, but necessary. What do these parents tell their children about eating vegetables, about not sending lewd photos of themselves on their cell phones, about not driving too fast, etc.? I don’t know how the “child-centered” lifestyle has permeated our culture, but it has.
The point that says it all is the one you made about air travel being run by private businesses. Absolutely spot-on. People act like they’re entitled to making the rules everywhere they go. This just is not so.
It appears that the same people who are for terrorist-profiling feel that they are exempt from following the same rules as everyone else. ANYONE can be a terrorist, and yes, that means even you, yoga mommy.
Sorry, it should have read “the citizens with which she rides.”
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