We are a fickle nation, never removing the blinders and believe in profiling/stereotyping everyone that is not of us. How dare someone, not of us, cause so much inconvenience in our travels?
I say this because even though there is the inconvenience of traveling with the TSA abound, they are there to act like a “speed bump” is keeping us safe. So as someone as important as Senator Rand Paul is inconvenience over a “glitch” of a scanner, he should actually commend the extra enforcement.
I guess the US Flag lapel pin should’ve tip the TSA agents off that he is above the fray of others of inconvenience and stroll on through.
Sen. Paul, sorry about your damn luck*!
Too this day, many Americans still believe that a Terrorist only comes in one form; that of a scraggly beard Middle Eastern man wearing a turban.
I have to ask Sen. Paul this, what if we only profiled those as stated above at airports and a 300lb man wearing a cowboy hat and crocs boarded your flight and once in flight detonated a bomb killing all on board. What would the knee-jerk reaction be then?
We do have a Domestic Terrorism problem in this Nation, yet many Americans find it hard to believe that a citizen of the United States would want to do harm on our sacred ground.
Wake up people, terrorism has many forms and over 100 definitions.
For great examples of domestic terrorism one only has to go back to Timothy McVeigh/Terry Nichols & Oklahoma City bombings (1995) and Eric Robert Rudolph & Centennial Olympic Park bombings (1998)amongst his other actions of bombing an abortion clinic.
Funny story about Rudolph as he was caught in North Carolina five years later, scavenging for food in a trash container as he hid in the woods, but also was being helped by the local community! They knew he was there, but refused to turn him in.
Ok, those two examples were pre-9/11, well before the TSA of today, so you want something newer post-9/11.
Well after 9/11 there were Bruce Edwards Ivins’ Anthrax attacks (2001), James W. Vonn Brunn’s Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting (2009), and Andrew Joseph Stack III Austin IRS building attack (2009).
You remember the last one, a suicidal Stack flying his Piper Dakota airplane into the Echelon IRS building in Austin, killing a federal employee and injuring many others due to his disdain for the “US Government, IRS, Enron, Unions and the Catholic Church.”
The disturbing part of Stack’s actions was the interaction of social media afterwards as numerous Facebook pages were created in his honor and then the political grandstanding by Iowa’s Steve King who stood tall and stated “I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax (in its place)."
What do they all have in common? All were Mid Western Caucasian males that look like your neighbor, yet all committed acts of terrorism, except Ivins, he was from Maryland.
But even abroad, there are terrorists outside the profile.
For instance, back in June 2010, the US listed Chechen insurgent leader Doku Umarov as a terrorist, to which the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda stated “...maybe now in the West they will seriously take care of militants and their international sponsors.”
So as we look upon all Middle Eastern looking people as terrorists still to this day, we forget that amongst us anyone can be a terrorist.
So as a few days pass and Sen. Paul is still feeling inconvenienced over the TSA incident, he has been taking to the airwaves, telling everyone about his horrifying embarrassing situation when he had to raise his right pant leg to show nothing was there.
Also Sen. Paul has been crying that “I’ve been told that the scanners are set to go off randomly, no matter what.” Good! Let it be.
I’ll take random “glitches” in the name of security, I have nothing to hide. I’ll probably feel a hell of a lot safer as well.
I’ve been pulled aside by TSA myself, in 2004, because I was stupid enough to wear a pair of Khaki cargo shorts that had metal snap buttons on the pockets!
I set the metal detector off 3xs, had the TSA agent wand me 3xs before being asked to follow him (plus 3 other agents around me) to an area off to the side that was outlined in tape, where a 9 year old boy was sitting as well. He too had set off the metal detectors.
15 minutes later and after hearing “Sir I have to touch you (snap of the latex gloves) are you ok with this?” With my only reply being “Sure, why not (as I giggle only to look over to my wife with steam coming from her ears)” had their Supervisor arrive to see what was going on and determined that I was correct on the metal snap buttons and allowed to leave.
Oh and as for the 9 year old boy, the TSA agents asked me not to forget my son, to the dismay of his mother, who screamed “Hey that’s my kid.”
I’m not saying the TSA is perfect and nor are they acting out the scene from the comedy Airplane II, but they have a job to do, just like anyone else.
So I say to you Sen. Paul, keep the “over reaching government” rhetoric that you and your father bestow upon us daily to yourself, shut up and do as asked to keep the line moving for the rest of us waiting to reach our flight.
That’s it, off to the Gold Members club for a Guinness Stout and stale peanuts. Enjoy your flight, recline your seat, and pay your political tab.
* catchphrase borrowed from Impact Wrestling star James Storm
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/rand-paul-reveals-tsa-theory-to-glenn-scanners-go-off-to-justify-random-patdowns/
http://www.wsmv.com/story/16578487/ky-senator-rand-paul-detained-at-bna
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2012/0124/Rand-Paul-s-TSA-moment-airport-patdowns-around-the-world
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