Taunt the TSA

by Brad
WendyMcElroy.com
Nov. 23, 2010

If you have to fly, opt out of the porno-scanner. And when you're getting groped, tell the molester exactly what you feel...because, as TechDirt reports, that is starting to make a difference:

"Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep. These are all words I have heard today at work describing me, said in my presence as I patted passengers down. These comments are painful and demoralizing, one day is bad enough, but I have to come back tomorrow, the next day and the day after that to keep hearing these comments. If something doesn't change in the next two weeks I don't know how much longer I can withstand this taunting. I go home and I cry. I am serving my country, I should not have to go home and cry after a day of honorably serving my country."

Allow me to reply to this poor, poor man. First, you're not "serving your country," you're serving yourself by getting paid more than you could earn at honest work...and you're serving a useless government bureaucracy that is only interested in increasing its own power and forcing servile compliance on U.S. citizens. Second, what you're doing -- "I'm only following orders" -- is not honorable, and hasn't been honorable since the Nuremberg trials. Third, read a few news stories (e.g. this, and this) to learn that the humiliation you feel is only a tiny fraction of what you inflict on people who had no choice but to deal with you. You, on the other hand, have a choice: quit. Go on strike. Or just refuse to grope.

Travelers! Taunt them. Use your own judgment about how much you can safely say, but insult the TSA goons and make them feel like the perverts and Stasi that they are. Because the taunts are having an effect:

"I served a tour in Afghanistan followed by a tour in Iraq. I have been hardened by war and in the past week I am slowly being broken by the constant diatribe of hateful comments being lobbed at me. While many just see a uniform with gloves feeling them for concealed items I am a person, I am a person who has feelings. I am a person who has served this country. I am a person who wants to continue serving his country. The constant run of hateful comments while I perform my job will break me down faster and harder than anything I encountered while in combat in the Army."

And if you're too kind-hearted, or too timid, to hurl an insult at the TSA, there's another approach, suggested by Salon's Dan Gillmor:

I haven't been in a circumstance, yet, where I've had to opt out of a strip-search scan, but I will do so at every opportunity. And when a TSA employee fingers my testicles and penis, I plan to say to him, "This must be as degrading for you as it is for me. Why do you work for such people?"