If you want to fly these days, there's a high probability that you will be given two choices. The choices are: subject yourself to potentially harmful x-rays as you allow a stranger to view your naked body or, be patted down by someone you don't know in a manner that others have described as humiliating, demeaning, and emotionally debilitating. To touch someone the way a TSA official touches people would be a crime in any other setting, but no longer is classified as such when a TSA employee does it. How America is being protected by having a TSA agent touch your penis, vagina or breasts is not explained.
One can expect that this kind of invasion of privacy is only the beginning. One day someone will bypass these detection procedures by hiding some kind of device in their rectum or vagina and then the TSA will want to routinely explore these places too with your clothes off like they do in prisons. Surely this is a major victory for terrorism. If we are in a war against terrorism, it's a war we are losing badly. We're now doing to ourselves what our enemies would very much like to do to us... risk free.
Whoever thought up these procedures, or gave the OK to use them, may not have considered them to be acts of political repression, but surely that is what they are. If we are to be subjected to these procedures, we no longer live in the country our Founding Fathers envisioned. When you live under a repressive regime you are no longer secure in your person; you live in constant fear of having your life, your possessions, or your dignity taken from you. When you live in fear, your mental and physical health is at risk, not to mention your happiness.
On the other hand, these acts of terror are to be expected. Citizens of the United States cannot allow their government to intimidate, terrorize and persecute other peoples without eventually learning that we will have to pay a corresponding price for committing these crimes. What is happening is simply the natural order of things. It is how life works. It is one of the great lessons of history. The artifacts of regressive regimes fill the world's museums and continue to be favored holiday destination sites of vacationers worldwide.
All human beings are destined to learn the meaning of compassion. Too bad we can't learn it simply by looking over the artifacts of other people's pain; we insist on learning it for ourselves first hand. The lesson: what goes around, comes around. And here it is. And there's more on the way. And it won't stop coming around, until we stop sending it around.
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