Sorry folks. I took a week off for a business trip to Tulsa and a few days visiting with Grandma and Grandpa down in Florida. Unfortunately, our trip to the Sunshine State happened to coincide with the arrival of Tropical Storm Fay which pretty much torpedoed all of our planned outdoor activities. Traveling with the two boys on the airplane was less stressful than I expected. There were no major freak-outs or screaming fits, although when we exited the plane in New York, the row we were seated in looked like the Giant Stadium parking lot after a playoff game. I am not the most organized packer in the world but I do get around for business and have developed a fairly static routine that gets me through airports and to my destination without too much fuss. Such a routine approach to travel is impossible when you are also lugging two kids and their equipment around. A flexible approach is best for one’s mental health. The most important lesson I learned is that it is easier to get through security and to the gate if the kids are rendered completely immobile for 99% of the time. I had Jack in a backpack carrier and Dimitri was more or less strapped into a stroller. Newark airport is a pit, but Tampa actually has a carpeted playground next to the Continental departure gates; a godsend if your flight is delayed. Unfortunately for us, our flight was delayed on the way out of New York; we sat on the tarmac for 30 interminable minutes until we had to go back to the gate to drop off a sick passenger.
The only other glitch was on our way through security in Tampa, Erin was selected for “special screening” because her handbag was deemed “too heavy” by the TSA clerk. “There isn’t anything in there that could hurt me, is there?” he intoned as he solemnly poked through a years worth of ATM receipts in a handbag about the size of a vanilla latte. What a dick. He also didn’t want to let Jack’s bottle or Dimitri’s juice through but relented after realizing that he would get the opportunity to tear the rest of Erin’s luggage apart. Such a farce. And completely ineffective at diverting any sort of terrorism. Erin walked through the first checkpoint when the guard’s attention was diverted by a couple of dangerous looking grannies and made it to the second checkpoint without anyone even looking at her ID or boarding pass. I was carrying both suitcases but the geniuses at TSA didn’t realize we were traveling together and didn’t find it the least bit odd that Erin was carrying a small handbag and knapsack, with no checked luggage and two children. No one ever asked to look at my luggage, although I was told by the airline (!) that I was going to be selected for special screening when I got to the airport.
The TSA is the most useless government agency since the CIA. Seven years since the 911 attacks (which the TSA would not have stopped) and there still isn’t anywhere to put your shoes on after you get through the line. Never mind the indignity of being questioned by someone who probably couldn’t get a job at Burger King and made the TSA their fall-back plan. Ah, well, government agencies tend to accumulate like barnacles on a ship's hull - once created, they're pretty hard to remove and they keep replicating themselves. Especially the ones granted some sort of quasi-police powers.
The very creation of the TSA was a triumph of Republican free-market ideals combined with the persistence of bureaucracy; a dangerous combination that succeeded at nothing other than funneling large sums of tax dollars into the pockets of private security companies. Created in November 2001, the TSA’s goal was ostensibly to secure our nation's transportation system by replacing private airport security screeners with "fully trained, professional" federal screeners. The head of the TSA went about this, of course, by hiring a private company to train and provide the screeners. While this proved that they were adept at the particularly Republican, supply-side skill of creating something no one needs and then billing them for it, (TSA blew through its original $2.4 billion budget requested an additional $4.4 billion by the summer of 2002) the architects of the TSA were much less effective at their actual mission of keeping weapons off airplanes. The TSA regularly fails its own security tests. In 2002, TSA documents revealed that their screeners were missing 24% of mock weapons in undercover tests, with some airports experiencing a 50% failure rate. LAX had a 41% failure rate. They even failed when they realized they were being tested, as screeners had begun to recognize the testers but still failed to find smuggled weapons. That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
All of this is to say that being dressed down by a government lackey in an airport while juggling two kids and all of our stuff was a crappy ending to a difficult trip. Next time maybe we’ll take the train.
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2 comments:
Well the TSA did accomplish a couple of things. As you pointed out, it is really good at funneling our slave dollars to Republican captains of industry. The other thing it does is keep up the booga booga of terrorism - much like the media - keeping the public scared like sheep and seeking protection from benovolent big brother. Those who did 9/11 consider the TSA insurance on their initial 9/11 investment, insuring that people remain afraid and separating them from their money.
I would agree with you except for the fact that most air travelers laugh at the TSA and know that taking off their shoes and being compelled to purchase minute quantities of hair gel have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Maybe that was the intent of the initial architects of the agency, but along with the Orange Alert, the government's attempt to manipulate people's feelings about terror have proven less effective with the passage of time.
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