Your Papers Please…
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin
it is going to be a busy couple of weeks. I will be on the road a lot and doing a lot more time going through airports than I like doing. I will be heading off for my denominational clergy and chaplain conference tomorrow morning flying from Norfolk to Houston Texas. Then I will return to Norfolk next Monday and then go to Germany for a Military meeting the following Tuesday and return on the 28th. It will be the most I have flown in a two week period since I was with Marine Security Forces back in 2006. I hate flying or at least going through crowded airports.
Now I am an old hand at air travel especially in the post-911 everybody is a potential hijacker world. I have been accosted in full uniform by TSA agent and nearly made to strip despite having orders and ID for my travel in uniform back during the Bush administration while people that were obvious foreign nationals passed right by me and through the screening process. I have been groped, scanned and nearly stripped and personally I think that we have gone overboard and that in the end that it is bad for the country and for civil liberties.
When I returned from Iraq I had to take off my boots and nearly miss my connecting flight because of the tight connection. You would think that the bureaucracy would have the sense to figure out that guys coming back from a combat zone should be treated with a little more care. Thankfully despite the hassle I made my flight and the people were nice. However the ridiculousness of hundreds of returning combat vets just back from the combat zone being told to remove their boots and belts on their return to the United States is not just ridiculous but humiliating.
I hate going through airports now. I don’t feel safe. Yes it is part of my PTSD as with the exception of the ballpark crowded places scare me to death and the “security screening” process does nothing to help. I know that I have bitched about this before and I have been criticized by pond scum “national security” fascists that have never even served a day in uniform who have told me that I need to realize that we are “at war and that terrorist want to kill us” and that we all have to “make sacrifices.” My personal feeling is that those that spout this stuff and advocate more “pre-emptive wars” need to blow it out their ass. Otto Von Bismarck who by the way was not pacifist said “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
I tell you what, those that spout that kind of crap piss me off to no end. When we actually resume the draft and something more than 0.5% of the country’s population actually bother to serve in the military and go to war then I will agree about all of us making sacrifices. Until then I think that all the talk about shared sacrifice is so much bullshit. The only people that have made the sacrifice are the military, those employed by the military and our families.
The real truth of the matter is that very little of this country is at war. It is not enough just to put a bumper sticker that you “support the troops” on your car or be able to quote some patriot bullshit out of a war movie. It actually means being connected and part of the war effort. It means paying taxes and volunteering to help the troops… wait even better join the military.
Back in the Vietnam Era the American film icon John Wayne went on Rowan’s and Martin’s “Laugh In.” In line that I will never forget Wayne walked on stage with a red white an blue flower in his hands. He began: “A Poem: The Sky: The sky is blue, the grass is green. Get off your butts and join the Marines.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6_–RqzdM
We are not a nation that even acts like it is at war. We ignore the fact that Americans and our allies are fighting and dying in Afghanistan because we are more interested in our political party’s agenda or our personal economic bottom line. Really, how many people even realized that a bunch of Americans were killed in Afghanistan during the past week or that the Taliban attacked supposedly secure areas in Kabul including the US, Russian and German embassies as well as the Afghan Parliament building? Actually to read the news unless you follow MSNBC, CNN, NPR or perhaps BBC or Al Jazira you probably didn’t see it in the Drudge Report or other “conservative”media outlets. In fact it was’t mention by Drudge. I guess that it is not important then.
So tomorrow I will begin my travels and since I don’t do well in airport crowds after my time in Iraq and fond those places terrifying I will remember that any humiliations that I endure at the hands of the TSA are all for the war effort and to make everyone else feel better. At least I can have a beer at the sports bar in the airport for breakfast before I go through security. That will make me feel a bit better.
I hope that doesn’t sound too cynical but I have seen too much of war to listen to those that think that strip searches, genital fondling and scanners that show one in all of their naked glory do little for the actual security of the country. It does make the average person feel better but it does little in the way of national security. I mean really…
Think about it.
Peace
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 