Forty-eight catholic high school girls accompanied by six chaperones on a trip to Europe and who is the sole person to be "randomly" searched at the airport? How shocking, the only middle-eastern person on the trip, yours truly. Yes, my hair is dark, my facial features clearly ethnic, and my last name ten letters long with more consonants in a row than most of anything found in the Americas, but does that mean that suddenly it’s ok for utter hassle and inconvenience? September 11 was a day of inexplicable horror and atrocity. There is no doubt of this. But the security actions that have been implemented since then compromise the liberties of the people who are supposedly being protected. Sorry, but I don’t make it a habit to carry around box-cutters or bombs, at the airport, or anywhere else. And no, I don’t plan on flying an airplane into anything, or sprinkling anthrax on those who irritate me. I’m the avid smoker who doesn’t even bring matches in her carry-on for fear of giving even the slightest justification for being excessively searched. Yet for some reason, of the nineteen flights that I have been on in the past six years, I was "randomly" searched twelve times. How random.
The Christmas of 2001, my family went to Florida. The two and a half hour security check that we had to endure that almost made us miss our flight, not so merry. Finding slips of paper from Homeland Security notifying me that my checked baggage was searched on my way to the East Coast this summer? Boy do I feel like they’re really fighting the terrorists. My best friend and I nearly missing our flight the next morning because I forgot that there was a metal clip holding the flower in my hair which therefore, of course, warranted a forty-five minute search of everything in both of our carry-ons, plus a full body scan in some sort of creepy box of detection. Ohh our tax dollars being put to good use. But I suppose it makes sense. I mean, Jesus, I’m a twenty-year old college student, I’m really threatening the national security by flying across the country to visit old friends and see the first night of the singer of my favorite band’s solo tour. Look out! The most threatening thing about me is my liberal ideology, and the fact that I still remember the notions of liberty and personal freedoms upon which this country was founded. Guess what, you’re not gonna find that tucked away in my carry-on.
I love airports. I love traveling and flying and visiting new places. But try throwing out a $120 bottle of perfume because it was .2 ounces over the allotted amount of liquid you can bring in your carry-on (for a forty-five minute flight for which you didn’t check any luggage). They’re only now letting us bring travel size toiletries again; before, it didn’t matter if you were on a fourteen hour flight, no deodorant meant no deodorant, gel or solid, so you inevitably became that guy who smells like b.o. Or worse, you sat next to the guy who smells like b.o. and there’s no escape. I am waiting for the day that some asshole tries to make a bomb out of an iPod and then they ban those too.
The fact of the matter is that many of the precautions being taken in the name of security do great to appear as though our government is protecting us, when in actuality, they are little more than vast inconveniences for the general public. Random searches are more than deliberate and security measures are being based on stereotypes. Is this the kind of protection we want? For myself, the answer is most certainly not.
