PrintNovember 19, 2010
Why Air Security is the Issue
I submit that if we don't beat back the TSA's assault on innocent travelers, we might lose our nation for good. Or perhaps it would mean we have already lost it.
The reality is that the TSA is no more about airline security than ObamaCare was about affordable health care. Both the organization and the bill are about the dehumanization -- and control -- of theoretically free Americans. Thus, it is critical that Americans win push back efforts against both, because if we lose on these two fronts, we have effectively lost most of our freedom.
Now I realize there have been attacks on human freedoms all over our bureaucracy-infected society long before ObamaCare and Janet Incompetano's "grope and change" policies were in place. I submit, however, that if both our medical care and our mobility are controlled by the whims of government bureaucrats -- issues like toys in Happy Meals or sodium- and fat-free restaurants will be irrelevant.
Private property rights -- which are also under attack everywhere from the IRS to the EPA -- include the acquisition of financial resources. One of the great freedoms provided by those resources is the ability to move about. Those who attack one attack the other. Citizens who are self-sufficient and on the go are much harder to control than those who are not.
It is no coincidence that liberalism flourishes in the big cities, where people live in close quarters in a high-rise urban lifestyle. A nation of Seinfelds is easier to keep tabs on than a nation of Palins. As such, the Seinfelds don't even feel the morphing grip of bureaucrats because they rarely do anything or go anywhere that threatens the bureaucratic state's ability to control.
The Palins of the country instinctively feel this grip and abhor it.
This is why nothing scares the statist like the red/blue maps -- the ones that break the country down by county or precinct, not by state. Such maps show how difficult it will be to gain control over us as long as we can move about the vast red areas. If that mobility is curtailed, then so is a lot our freedom.
(Just a thought: seems like the same statists are perfectly happy with a devalued dollar and skyrocketing fuel prices -- thus making all travel more expensive, too. I'm sure it's just coincidence.)
Certain issues like the Happy Meal toy fiasco amuse and inform. Others really do rip freedom right out from under people. The fact that it's taken this long for Americans to revolt against this revolting and ineffective air security scam is frightening in and of itself. Every time I have been forced to fly -- and I do only when traveling across large bodies of water -- the security line episodes gave me a feeling like I'm playing a movie extra in a scene in some third-world country. Free people don't get treated this way and remain docile -- or free. Freedom requires at least a modicum of dignity. There is none available in the TSA line.
It is always shocking to me how many folks are OK with being treated like cattle. Any thinking person instinctively understands that these ridiculous security measures are not going to make us any safer, because any thinking person knows damned well that it is young Muslim males, not four ounces of grandma's shampoo, that destroy airplanes and people and buildings.
It would be bad enough if any of this loss of freedom were actually making us safer. It is not, and there are much easier and less expensive ways to do so. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that those in charge are either really foolish or doing this on purpose, or a combination of both. And interviews with travelers indicate that there is a fairly high "naïf factor" among us. You know, the "I don't like it, but if this is what it takes to keep us safer..." crowd. Puh-leeze.
Then again, the 2008 elections showed that same naïveté. Those results also sent a lot of people into a funk of near-resignation to the fact that the nation was perhaps doomed.
Then along came the Tea Party movement -- riding the coattails of ObamaCare and waking up the slumbering while rejuvenating the depressed. The Tea Party election of 2010 has done a lot to increase the optimism of patriots everywhere -- maybe this country is not lost after all. As we know now, there are indeed many millions of Americans who do want to save the country -- as founded.
And along comes the "don't touch my junk" viral video and the screaming three-year-old being molested in her mother's arms by an overly diligent TSA agent. These are awful moments that might indeed be some of our "finest hours."
These videos should wake even more people up to the dangers of turning our lives over to the power-hungry who command millions of incompetents. And the same images should embolden the already informed. There is a certain "stench" of a government bureaucracy. It's what one senses inside any DMV office or IRS office or Social Security office. It's a freedom-draining system of shackles put in place by elites and carried out by factotums. And nothing captures it quite like the TSA.
The TSA restricts. It dehumanizes. It depresses. It invades. It costs. It fails in its stated mission as it creates jobs for the unemployable. It is government on display for all to see. It is what our health care will become if we keep silent.
It's un-American. And it's not America. Not yet. But if we cannot defeat ObamaCare and the TSA's "grope and change," we won't recognize America in the near future. This is why it is such a defining and critical issue.
