WHAT’S THE POINT?
My partner and I are on our first real vacation in two years. Well, sort of, we’re actually at SIGGRAPH in Boston. His movie is being shown, and he has a few interviews to do. I have few duties this week, so it’s a welcome break from the day-to-day madness known as our life.
Traveling these days by air involves being shuttled from one “security zone” to the next. One treks back and forth as various individuals who are sporting badges, demonstrating their authenticity as honest government officials asking inane questions and performing “tests” on our luggage. It all seems like some kid’s exercise or a work provision designed to keep the unemployable occupied.
The Department of Homeland Security personnel all appear to be hardworking people, until you look below the surface. At first blush, there are many of them operating the airport, checking bags for bombs, sharp objects and the ever-dangerous cigarette lighter or book of matches in a suitcase. They check our clothing, and make sure that we have photo identification — lest we forget who we are.
As the airlines have systematically cut jobs to try and stay in the air, they have increased the number of self-serve opportunities, which means that our airlines are fast becoming like those of other countries: no frills and no fun.
We can make our reservations online, check in by swiping a credit card, a boarding pass prints out, and the first time you interact with a human is when you need them to hand you the baggage sticker that goes on your checked bags. They don’t even put your bags on the conveyor belt to go to the plane, you have to carry them all the way to the west end of the terminal so they can be screened by the transportation safety agency.
The line for the bag screener goes fairly quickly, but then what would you expect when all they do is ask if you have any illegal items in your bag, then take the bag from you and put it on a conveyor belt? Granted, it does go through some machine that checks to make sure the electric toothbrush isn’t connected to dynamite.
Then there is the guy who randomly swabs some bags to check for biochemical weapons. Based on his lackluster speed of processing, I think he would have rather been at a Dodgers game than doing his job. Of course, the fact that there hundreds of bags to process only means job security for him.
After you drop your bags at the scan station, you then have to walk to the east end of the terminal, go up an escalator so you can join a line of people who are waiting to be scanned at the west end of the terminal, right above where you dropped off your bags.
The body scan and carry-on scanners are so bored with their jobs that it shows in their faces. When we walked past the bag scanner, which I realize is fully automated and sounds an alarm when something suspicious is detected, the operator was chatting with one of his co-workers and not paying attention to the machine.
The body-scan people make us go through a ridiculous exercise of emptying our pockets and removing shoes, and it all seems absurdly designed to make us believe we are safer but without actually increasing safety. When the 16-year-old black girl traveling with her large family has to turn around and show the official the bottoms of her flip-flops, we’ve surpassed the lowest point of rational concern.
As I handed my boarding pass and drivers license to the checker, she didn’t even look me in the face to see if I matched the photo on my license. All this walking and checking and delaying seems to be pointless.
History has shown that terrorists are religious zealots, generally disaffected young men who have too much time on their hands and too little material goods to care about their life. Happy people are not terrorists. Healthy well-fed, materially rich people are not terrorists.
People who have hope of being financially better off than they were two weeks ago are not terrorists. This “war on terror” is not going to be won by making gay men who are going to computer conventions stand in lines and answer stupid questions, like “Has anyone put anything in your bags that you don’t know about?”
To win this war, we need real solutions to world poverty and the recognition that though not everyone can own a yacht, we can all have hope of owning one, and that is what stops a terrorist mindset from growing in a culture. Why do terrorists always come from poor countries? Because they have nothing to lose.
The battle for hearts and minds goes to the side that first feeds the people, then clothes them, and finally entertains them. Like the song says, we can bomb the world, but we cannot bomb it into peace. (David Pisarra is a lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664-9969.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 1, 2006. Read the original PDF.