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You’re probably aware of the recent proposed change to TSA procedures allowing knives to be carried on board commercial airliners. Like everything else going on in this country, this has stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy.
I carry a knife everywhere I go as a matter of convenience and with the knowledge that should the situation arise, I can defend myself at least to some degree. I can put it in checked baggage (and probably never see it again), or leave it at home if I am traveling only with carry-on luggage.
But the larger issue of security theater as a “feel good” approach has resulted in lines of lunacy at airports all over this country in which little children, senior citizens in wheelchairs or with colostomy bags, and anyone with a metal medical device of any kind in their body are subjected to invasive hands-on assaults or radiation devices that from the very beginning were known to be only as effective as the manufacturers said they were. Case in point, the backscatter machines now being removed. If they absolutely had to be installed in the first place, it seems more than a little suspect that they are not needed now.
And underneath all this showmanship is the hidden highway that passengers never see, where thousands of workers enter what should be the most secure area on an airport, and they do so without being subjected to the same degree of inspection going on above them in the concourses. Think baggage handler, bomb, and boom.
Collectively, as a nation, we are fooling ourselves and being fooled in like kind, and we have only ourselves to blame. And it’s not about knives or pens or paper clips as weapons but the person, and a government that can’t get its act together in this or any other aspect of their duty to the American people. The longest continuous period of warfare in our history, sustained with the sweat, blood and flesh of a tiny percentage of patriotic American volunteers, a fiscal cancer aggressively spreading through the core of this great land, and a narcissistic nation obsessed with the latest i-whatever while Rome burns around them.
To carry a knife on board or not? The tip of the iceberg. Chaff in the wind. A grain of sand in a desert.
