If you should to see this happening at an airport, don't stand mute and permit the seemingly never-ending assault on our rights to continue. Do what I plan to do. While in a location where it would take a few seconds for a TSA agent to reach you, drop your pants, whip off your shirt and undergarments, and scream "I'm an American guaranteed Fourth Amendment Rights by our Constitution, and I'm Opting Out." While this might not be an approach that's equally effective for everyone, believe me: I will be noticed.
I should note that to this point I've never challenged any demands made of me by airport security, regardless of their absurdity and intrinsic worthlessness as effective security measures. I've been questioned, asked to remove items from my baggage, wanded, and body scanned by the generally polite TSA folk without incident.
But what TSA is doing now is reprehensible. These scare tactics of overkill, and the blatant, willful disregard of our basic rights as citizens, are profoundly wrong and should not be tolerated by anyone who considers himself and American.
To quote actor and former National Rifle Association president, the late Charleton Heston:
"Well, the answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people."
"You simply disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely."
"But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey the social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom."
There is something fundamentally wrong in a society that allows people to carry concealed weapons into Starbucks but harasses attractive young women and grandmas in wheelchairs just because they make perfect participants in the theater of the absurd that TSA calls "security."
In the mid to late 90s, the Internal Revenue Service was the object of Congressional hearings when the agency engaged in egregious and reprehensible activities "for the greater good." Congress stopped the IRS' Gestapo-like tactics in short order after they were exposed. It's time for them to do it again. Stop this insult to our rights and our basic dignity. Now.
Write the President. Write your Senator and Congressman. If you or a friend are insulted or assaulted by TSA and/or local police at the airport, do what we Americans do best: bitch, at the top of your lungs, to everyone and anyone in authority. Make a scene. Get as many witnesses as possible. Get as much information as possible and contact the American Civil Liberties Union.
Don't interfere or disrupt normal screening processes. But if TSA decides to make you the star of their little security pageant, by God, make the performance a memorable one.
This is America, folks. Our service men and women are making supreme sacrifices overseas to guarantee our freedom. Let's do our part by defending the Constitution here at home as well.
Categories: Fourth Amendment, Hypocrisy, KGB Opinion, U.S. Constitution, WTF?, YouTube
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