Amid horror stories, press reports, and public outrage over the U.S. government’s blatant violation of an American citizen’s right to travel unmolested by the state, the TSA was accepted by the American people this Thanksgiving. The TSA had recently changed its security procedures to include state-sponsored groping by government agents for those passengers who declined a full body scan, another recent addition to the TSA’s battery of dictates for Americans who travel by commercial aviation. Established under the equally wretched Homeland Security department, another monstrosity created by George W. Bush (and continued by Barack Obama), the TSA possesses and uses unprecedented power over anyone who travels in America.
Less than 10 years after middle class, college-educated Islamic terrorists boarded American jets without violating a single aviation security law, the U.S. is on its way to becoming a dictatorship.
How did this happen and why? I do not pretend to know all the answers. I do know that, as the TSA furor reached its Thanksgiving climax, something happened and we lost our rights. Judging by personal experience and observation, Americans did what, unfortunately, (today’s) Americans do. They choked. Rather than take ideas seriously, when faced with imminent and grave threat to their individual rights, they opted for total submission to government control; faith in the state.
There were no serious, widespread protests in opposition, no outbursts, no real resistance to the molestation. I think the public’s submission began in earnest with a line that has been improperly interpreted by some as having sparked an uproar. The San Diego, California, passenger who strenuously objected to the government’s handling of his “junk” unintentionally made a joke of the TSA’s existence, as anyone with a Puritanical streak who’s uncomfortable at having to think about the TSA’s legally-sanctioned violation launched into what’s become an endless parade of jokes about touching one’s “junk”.
But the human body and its most precious parts are not junk; the body is an exalted, sacred form that should be treated with respect. Not pawed at random by a government agent who’s eager to put the nation on perpetual lockdown in the meantime while the Defense Department does nothing to defend the United States of America. No, the TSA, which ought to be abolished with its host the Department of Homeland Security, will not end anytime soon. It will fester and get worse and so will the jihadist enemy and the states that sponsor them (which the U.S. government appeases).
The TSA will start to stop when Americans stop making a joke out of tyranny and cease referring to that which ought to be regarded as sacred as “junk”. It will stop when Americans start thinking, the first step toward thinking for themselves.