Seriously?

Our freedom fighting TSA agents have rescued us once again from the evil terrorists masquerading as four-year-old Midwestern girls.

In a Huffington Post story today, (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/tsa-defends-pat-down-of-c_n_1454410.html?icid=maing-) Isabella Brademeyer was targeted as a suspect at an airport in Wichita, Kansas after hugging her grandmother. Isabella had just been taught the dangers of talking to strangers, according to her parents, and was screaming and terrified as she was patted down, her family crying as they looked on. At one point she began to run away and agents threatened to shut down the entire airport if she did not come back. Her parents' statement on the matter conveyed that they understood the need for security but that there was no compassion or understand afforded their child and they had to realize that they were dealing with a four-year-old and not a terrorist.

Silly parents. Don't they understand that in today's travel environment everyone is a terrorist until proven unarmed? And rightfully so, I might add, since our post 911 screening procedures have thwarted untold numbers of would be assassins from boarding airplanes and blowing something up. Sarcasm aside, someone please tell me how many hijackings have been prevented by random rent-a-cops at the airport feeling us up and seeing us naked, taking our shoes and rooting thru our personal belongings? I have yet to see any real numbers here folks.

In my opinion, the entire screening process at airports is simply a show to keep us, the irrationally frightened traveler, happy and secure. This is certainly not a major issue I think about daily, but every now and again a story like this pops up that makes me wonder where the hell the America I grew up in is, you remember, the one where we were not afraid of a little danger if it meant we maintained the status of the only truly free nation on earth, the time when we actually had some mettle. I am tired of reading about people falling out of wheelchairs while being searched, of seeing videos of women so frightened and intimidated they are visibly shaking in videos while being singled out as suspects.

Lets face facts here. 911 did not happen because airport security was lax. It happened because our intelligence community did not have their act together. The right hand had no idea what the left hand was doing so the Jihadists slipped right thru the middle. Pretty simple. And since 911 that problem has been mostly resolved and we have prevented other attacks on us and other countries when they were still in the planning stages. Have we eliminated them totally? No, and we never will. A holy war is unwinnable and lasts as long as the zealots of that religion exist, so we need to learn to live with uncertainty like so many other nations have done for millennium. We are no long untouchable.

The last place a terrorist is going to go is another airplane.

Look, even a simple screening process of people and their luggage is going to yield almost anything that is a real threat. There is no need to "x-ray" passengers so that some faceless TSA agent can see them naked. And racist or not, the vast majority of terrorists look the part. They are from the mid-east, and the remaining ones are white drifting college students, usually male, who get sucked into this religion that seems more and more like a cult for the depressed and subnormally intelligent. So if you are going to torment your passengers, at least leave grandpa in his wheelchair alone.

As long as we are being honest here, our best defense has been and will continue to be, other passengers. On 911 a few brave men launched at attack on their hijackers that ultimately ended with the plane crashing in a field leaving no survivors. But those men, those heroes, set an example, planted a mindset in our citizens that states that we would rather die fighting than be held like cattle and allow ourselves to be quetly led to slaughter. I certainly have read more AP stories of passengers subduing other suspicious or rowdy passengers mid-flight than I have the TSA finding explosives strapped to a four-year-old at the airport in Kansas. So many people (myself included) board planes now with the resolve in their hearts that if anything "funny" should happen, we have no problem becoming the attackers, that we would rather give a rebel yell and go down in a ball of fire than be hijacked and on a plane that runs into a building full of people or is taken to god knows where. It happens. We hear about passengers doing just this. And this alone must give these terrorists pause, because oh my god the infidels have become as reckless and crazy as we are, which makes them unpredictable and fearless, and how do we fight that? Guess what, you don't.

The real danger here is not my nail clippers, it is not my shampoo or in the soles of my shoes, it is in the mindset of some Americans that all these abuses of privacy we must endure to fly are somehow justified, somehow keep us safe, when in actuality the very reason for these absurdities to be implimented in the first place was miscommunication between departments at a much higher government level than the barely effective airport security measures now in place. This also goes for the majority of The Patriot Act ( a misnomer if ever there was one) and Gitmo, both of which are blogs in and of themselves (yeah thanks for keeping THAT promise Obama). A person I love very much, a family member, who I consider very well read, very well versed in domestic and world affairs, who I consider highly intelligent and a rational thinker, still believes that giving up any amount of freedom is okay because:

1. Why do I care if they bug my house, I have nothing to hide…and
2. Any invasion of privacy, any indignity suffered is worth peace of mind and safety

This is NOT the American spirit, the do or die attitude. All the heroes lying in Arlington cemetery, the men at Gettysburg and in your local veterans hospital, they did not suffer or die so that we could roll over to both a foreign enemy and our own government, and allow our privacy, our liberties and our dignity, in any situation, to be taken away in the name of "safety". America is not about safety, it is about freedom, at any price, and this ideal is what gained us the respect we once had in the world, it brought some of the world's greatest minds to our shores, brilliant people who risked their lives and gave up family and property simply to be free to think, free to live and damn it we are not free if we allow people to be detained indefinitely, if all our neighbor has to do is cry "terrorist" for us to lose all our right, if some stranger can put her hands all over me because I want to fly to my family reunion in Topeka. Now, of all times, Patrick Henry's famous words should be ringing in our ears. I cannot say my choice would be death over liberty, but if I were in a plane and someone tried to tell me to lie on the floor, you bet I would gather my fellow passengers and beat the tar out of him, like its happened a dozen times before.

911 was an atrocity. Including Pearl Harbor (and I do have my reasons for this) it was the worst attack on American soil ever and it fundamentally changed who we are as a nation, as well it should. However, if we continue with these types of antics at airports, and personally invasive laws, which yield no real results, haven't they won anyway? And even if that were not the case, personally I have no intention of staying in this country if it means I have less privacy, less rights that our neighboring countries.

America, love it or leave it. Bull. I say American, love it or CHANGE IT. Change is what we are about and mine is one voice of millions that do not like, that will not tolerate, the abuse of power coming from Washington and the terror the fear mongers in congress are generating to slowly strip of, WILLINGLY, of our rights to dignity, privacy and due process.

And just for the record, this blog has been brought to you by a self proclaimed liberal who borders on socialism.