How we treat our Citizens...

I am supposed to be working on other things right now revolving around the usual topic of the Middle East and Arab American relations. However, the last two hours turned into a discussion with the other Cairo scholar (hopefully he will not mind me plagiarizing some of his comments) about the TSA and pretty much how George Orwell's "1984" might actually be coming into being.

I am not one to make dramatic leaps and comparisons of this nature. But the TSA, in my opinion, has absolutely lost its mind. We are truly going overboard in the name of security. We are humiliating people, our own citizens, in the name of what? We freak out if we try to provide this amount of security at our own borders. If these types of implementations were put on the border everyone would lose their minds about how we are treating immigrants unfairly...but our own citizens? Well, I guess we can do whatever to them in the name oh so sacred security.

Apparently someone on Fox News (always my favorite) made some remark about how men and women in the armed forces put their lives on the line every day so American citizens should make this small sacrifice in the name of security. I'll tell you what, THIS IS NOT the freedom that the men and women of the military stand for and protect. The military does not go to war so that our grandmothers and children can get groped by the TSA every time they want to take a flight. Indeed, if this is where our country is going, the terrorists have truly won. They have.

Backing away from the pure outrage and absurdity of the situation, lets just look at some of the logistics of it. The current scanners would not detect the underwear bomber of last Christmas. As Jeff Goldberg pointed out, they don't do anything for cavity bombs (God help us when we start addressing that issue). And lastly, all anyone has to do to cause an equal amount of mayhem and fear is detonate a bomb in the security line. Am I supposed to go creeping about my country afraid that everyone might be the next terrorist lurking behind the bushes? It's absurd. It's paranoid. This is not America. What are we doing?

Why don't we expend this amount of energy and money dealing with our borders? There is pretty much a war going on South of us...but we rarely seem to care about that, usually in the name of being politically correct and sensitive. I'm all about these things but not to the extent that our own citizens are being treated like garbage.

I am not looking forward to flying back to the US anytime soon...