I feel a cranky rant coming on.  Seeing terrorism prevented and flight safety is very important to me.  But how much of our constitutional rights to privacy and personal freedom should we sacrifice?  I am not a child of the 60’s.  I spent them in Catholic grammar school, graduating in 1969, and have been told that if I remember the 60’s (which I do) I wasn’t really there. 

I have a friend with knee replacements who gets felt up in public every time she flies.  She has two credit card looking things that have both a picture of each device as well as an x-ray of each knee with the knee replacement in place.  Not sufficient she is told, so she stands there while some strange lady feels her up.  Now, they are talking about virtual strip searches.  You stand there with your arms up while someone at a remote location looks at your naked body.  Nipples and breasts, testicles and penis, pubic hair triangle and buttocks along with your ass crack.  Can’t you see the pedophiles and perverts lining up for the scanning jobs?  The sexual predators glorying in the feeling of power resulting from being able to view the naked bodies of strangers whose only crime is wanting to travel by plane?  The trauma experienced by the victims of rape and other sexual assaults?  Is this what our country is about?  Don’t you think that our founding fathers are twirling like tops in their graves?

Please, airline security people, don’t think that I’m labeling you all as horrible and sleazy people.  But those type of people will be attracted to the position.  I have often heard people using the line “if it saves one life..”  But think about.  How much are we willing to give up in the name of “safety” — which, of course is not guaranteed no matter what we do.  In the late 1780’s Benjamin Franklin said “those who are willing to give up liberty for temporary safety deserve neither”.  No matter how many cameras on the streets and searches at the airports and the wide spread use of wands, terrorism will happen again.  In the meantime we will spend billions on security while knowing it won’t prevent what is bound to happen in the future.

So perhaps we should think very carefully about where we should go from here.  In protecting America, do we want to lose the essence of what our country is about?  I don’t have the answers, but I do know that what the USA stands for is very  important.  Let us be very careful in deciding where we go from here.  There has to be away of balancing the question of safety versus the constitutional freedoms that our way of life is based on.

If anyone out there would care to comment, I’d welcome other opinions.  Feel free to agree or rant back at me.  That’s another thing our country is about.  And we should revel in it.

Goodnight, folks……………

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Family & Friends, Health, Life, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.