The question isn't whether we can bear the humiliation and presumption of guilt the humiliating procedures involve. The question is whether we should. As a moral issue, should we really allow the government to say we can't fly on planes unless we are stripped naked or sexually molested? How much power do we want to give government, and how few rights do we want to give ourselves, when even our right to natural modesty and our presumption of innocence is no longer sacred?
Listen to the arguments for airport security, why aren't these arguments making ordinary Americans angry?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hveUwrSg5B4XJ7xmVWxRRz6i_PkA?docId=c0128a2838d64071b886e9917abcfd38
"Still, he pointed to the alleged attempt by a Nigerian with explosives in his underwear to try to bring down an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight last Christmas. "We all wish we lived in a world where security procedures at airports weren't necessary," Pistole said, "but that just isn't the case.""
Who says a single Nigerian failing to use an underwear bomb necessitates these new security procedures? I could think of many other security procedures instead. We could ban flights from Nigeria. We could ban Nigerians from flying on our planes. We could ban all citizens of Muslim countries from flying on our planes. Then, we wouldn't have to guard ourselves against potential Nigerian underwear bombers by stripping all Americans of their most basic rights. There is always a choice. This person presents a false either/or. Either all Americans are stripped and molested daily, or Nigerians will continuously blow up our airplanes. This is insane. The sentence makes no sense just by reading it. Why are you targeting Americans when it was a Nigerian who attempted the attack? How did this giant leap in logic come about? We're under attack from Nigerians, so I guess it's time to start strip searching Americans, aged 3 to 80, boy or girl. Why don't we instead find the typical profile of terrorist attackers, and then give extra security measures for people who fit into that profile, while leaving the rest of us innocent Americans alone?
I already know the liberal reply to both of these questions -- "A) Profiling is discrimination and that's wrong. We should treat everyone the same, only by punishing innocent white people with these security procedures do we have the moral right to punish innocent black or brown Muslims in the same way. In order to search the black and brown terrorists we know are the problem, we will have to search innocent black and brown people who are not terrorists. It isn't fair to them that their skin color makes them be searched while our skin color gives us special privileges to not be searched. It's better that we all suffer together so they don't feel victimized."
"B) If terrorists learned we were only searching black and brown terrorists who originate from Muslim countries, they would start using white terrorists from Christian countries. Then their explosives would escape security screening and succeed in killing us all. Only by checking everyone can we ensure our security."
Both of these arguments are fallacious. The presumption that 'other black and brown people are innocent' is the first problem. This is only true if you don't believe in collective guilt. I do believe in collective guilt. If a Saudi, or an Egyptian, or a Nigerian, is the terrorist, then all Saudis, Egyptians, and Nigerians are responsible for whatever culture, whatever genes, whatever upbringing, that produced said terrorist. Whatever those other Saudis, Egyptians, or Nigerians are doing to deter terrorists from emerging in their midst isn't working. Why shouldn't they be punished for their failure to raise non-terrorist fellow citizens? Fellow family members? Fellow religious devotees? If Saudis, Egyptians, Yemenis, and Nigerians don't want to be treated exclusively as the source of the 'problem,' they need to stop being the exclusive source of the problem. It's this simple. Not all cultures equally produce terrorist airplane bombers. In fact, nobody else does but Muslims. Muslims are the source of all airplane terrorism. Therefore muslims are collectively guilty for the phenomena of airplane insecurity, and should take the collective responsibility, and the collective punishment, of the security measures therefore used to stop airline terrorism. If muslims don't like being singled out, they need to stop acting so singularly. If they don't want to be treated worse than everyone else, they need to stop acting worse than everyone else. As soon as Muslims clean up their act and cease plotting airline terrorist attacks, we can stop all the security measures we've put in place to stop them. It is their move, not ours. The ball is in their court, not ours. We didn't ask for these terrorists to bomb us. We didn't want to be fighting this war. They started it, so they can end it. Meanwhile, all we can do is react proportionally. They want to bomb our airplanes, we can ban them from airplanes, strip search them for bombs, or whatever. If they don't want to bomb our airplanes, we can let them back on board, stop strip searching them, and return to peaceful coexistence.
It isn't unfair for Muslims to be treated worse than everyone else. It's unfair for everyone else to be treated equally to Muslims. Muslims are the terrorists. Muslims are the bad guys. What did we do to be lumped into the same category as them? Until we are producing just as many terrorist bombers as their communities do, what right does the government have to treat our community as 'just as dangerous' and 'just as suspicious' as theirs, the source of all terrorism?
Second, the idea of Muslim omnipotence is absurd. So far authorities have not admitted that a single Muslim terrorist airpline plot has worked. Muslims are so incompetent that whether they pack bombs in their shoes, their underwear, or anywhere else, they never explode and they never kill anyone anyway. So why are we acting like they are this enormous menace that has to be stopped by any means necessary? Full body scanners weren't necessary to stop the 9/11 hijackings. The only thing necessary is for cockpits to be locked and sealed from the rest of the plane. Cockpit locks were put in place long ago. It is now physically impossible to hijack a plane. Imagining that Muslim scientists are somewhere building super-powerful plastic explosives that can take out locked cockpits is again asserting Muslims omnipotence. Until they do design a successful bomb of that type, why are we jumping at shadows? Why are we guarding against the phantasms of our imagination as opposed to the real threats Muslims have presented us with? Just think about this, we're submitting to all this security in order to prevent zero deaths. Even without any security, not a single person would have been killed in the last ten years. This is because Muslims have failed to make one working bomb wielded by one non-suspicious looking person who could actually execute the attack. Shouldn't we at least wait until Al Qaeda can establish a pattern of success, of being able to take our planes down at will, before we start imposing draconian security standards to stop them?
Sure, we can imagine Al Qaeda recruiting white people who don't fit our ethnic/religious/nationality profiling who would penetrate our security measures and kill us all, but has Al Qaeda ever lived up to our imagination? Is there any proof they can actually find these recruits and produce these results? Is there any proof anyone outside of the crazed cultures they are raised in is willing to commit these terror attacks on Al Qaeda's behalf? Why do we just assume Al Qaeda can do 'this' or 'that' so long as we don't strip search everyone? Al Qaeda can't do anything. As far as the track record shows, Al Qaeda can't do anything. It hasn't done anything in ten years. These are the people we are living in fear of? These are the people we must do 'whatever necessary,' even submit to sexual molestation, to prevent? Let's get a sense of scale here. We aren't fighting Dr. Doom or some evil mastermind. We're fighting some primitives in caves who haven't built one working bomb they could smuggle onto a plane in the last ten years. ((long before these intrusive security measures were put in place.))
If your answer is 'better that everyone in America be sexually molested once a week than a single terrorist plane bombing' then you are a coward and a fool. The cost in human suffering of these security procedures is multiplied by millions of people, who each take dozens of flights, perhaps hundreds, over their lifetime. The misery of a handful of people dying to a terror bombing is limited and local. The number of people dying due to terrorist airline bombings is currently zero. Let's say that Al Qaeda has to blow up three planes in a row before we admit we need more intrusive security measures. Let's say they were all huge jets, so 1,000 people die. America has 307 million people. The odds that you would be among these 1,000 is 1 in 307,000. The odds of death by lightning strike 1 in 83,000, almost four times as likely. If someone came up with some crazy scheme to prevent death by lightning strikes via sexually molesting everyone in America every week, would that also be an 'acceptable and necessary price to pay?' After all, the threat of lightning is four times as great as the threat of this hypothetically competent terrorist enemy.
To compare this to other threats that we take no intrusive security measures against, and don't seem to require being seen naked or sexually assaulted by other humans to prevent:
All figures below are for U.S. residents.
| Cause of Death | Lifetime Odds |
| Heart Disease | 1-in-5 |
| Cancer | 1-in-7 |
| Stroke | 1-in-23 |
| Accidental Injury | 1-in-36 |
| Motor Vehicle Accident* | 1-in-100 |
| Intentional Self-harm (suicide) | 1-in-121 |
| Falling Down | 1-in-246 |
| Assault by Firearm | 1-in-325 |
| Fire or Smoke | 1-in-1,116 |
| Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.) | 1-in-3,357 |
| Electrocution* | 1-in-5,000 |
| Drowning | 1-in-8,942 |
| Air Travel Accident* | 1-in-20,000 |
| Flood* (included also in Natural Forces above) | 1-in-30,000 |
| Legal Execution | 1-in-58,618 |
| Tornado* (included also in Natural Forces above) | 1-in-60,000 |
| Lightning Strike (included also in Natural Forces above) | 1-in-83,930 |
| Snake, Bee or other Venomous Bite or Sting* | 1-in-100,000 |
| Earthquake (included also in Natural Forces above) | 1-in-131,890 |
| Dog Attack | 1-in-147,717 |
| Asteroid Impact* | 1-in-200,000** |
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050106_odds_of_dying.html#table
So before we take on evil airline terrorist bombers, we should tackle the much bigger problems of asteroids, dogs, earthquakes, tornadoes, falling down, drowning, electrocution, and the evil triumvirate of snakes, bees, and scorpions. All of whom are more dangerous than airline terrorist bombers.
Don't tell me that those deaths are unpreventable whereas airline terrorist bombs are preventable. First off, none of the security measures currently enforced could truly prevent a committed terrorist bomber. If we assume Muslim omnipotence, they could find a way through these security measures too. Second off, there are plenty of projects we could fund that could prevent deaths from the above causes. We could take all the money paying for security, for instance, and instead use it to fund health insurance for our poor dying of easily preventable heart conditions. Or we could subsidize cars that are built more solidly so that they result in fewer car accident deaths, or we could build safer highways that prevent more accidents by giving people better intersections or merging lanes. There is always a way to save lives with money. We could hire an army to hunt down and kill all snakes and dogs in this country, and we'd be saving more lives than our airline security measures. We could put up lightning rods every ten feet all across America, and we could save more lives than our airline security measures. We could hire people to hold old people's hands all day long so they don't fall down, and we'd save more lives than our airline security measures.
Furthermore, death is not the worst possible fate. An infinitesimal chance of death is less 'evil' than stubbing your toe. Death is just one more quality of life issue. The chance that you'll die at any given moment can be factored into your quality of life. This is well known to all extreme sports enthusiasts. They factor in the risk of death to the enjoyment of their sport, and find that the enjoyment is a larger positive than the risk of death is a negative. Extremely small risks of death do not noticeably lower quality of life. Being sexually molested does noticeably lower quality of life. Waiting endless hours to pass through airport security does noticeably lower quality of life. Being seen naked noticeably lowers quality of life. Having this happen to you all the time lowers your quality of life all the time. We are not willing to sacrifice quality of life by giving up on driving cars, or for that matter flying on airplanes that could naturally break, a risk far higher than terrorism according to the list above. Therefore why are we willing to sacrifice quality of life to prevent one of the most minuscule, remote dangers in existence from occurring? It makes no sense. It isn't rational. It's absurd.
What we are seeing is Americans being terrorized by their own government, and the media, into a false sense of priorities. They have been told that if we relax our vigilance, if we refuse to get screened, then immediately, the all-powerful Al Qaeda bogeyman is going to blow us all out of the sky. The threat of airline terrorism has been magnified to such a point that we are going through the most extreme measures imaginable to prevent them. Even children are being psychologically scarred for life to prevent these hypothetical terrorists.
"House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., appearing on CBS, said Congress would hold hearings on the "very controversial" issue of how to strike the right balance. Asked how he would feel about submitting to a pat-down, Hoyer said, "I don't think any of us feel that the discomfort and the delay is something that we like, but most people understand that we've got to keep airplanes safe.""
I don't understand. Unlike most Americans, I don't understand why we must do this to keep airplanes safe. I don't understand how Muslims will magically be able to take down every plane flying in the sky if we only search Muslims, or don't even search anyone at all. I don't understand why we couldn't wait and see if Muslims can actually kill us before we bother trying to stop them. I don't understand why we couldn't balance the costs of security in exact proportion to the risk of dying, like we do with driving cars and skiing. I don't understand our War on Terror. I don't understand why we have armies all over the world trying to kill men in caves who have proven themselves incapable of harming us no matter how hard they try for the last ten years. I don't understand why we have a trillion dollar military, money which could have been spent on life-saving health care, to prevent the real and present danger of heart attacks, cancer, and stroke, instead of trying to prevent an unreal, hypothetical terror attack which has a 0% chance of actually hurting me and mine. I don't understand why the fear of getting nuked, an infinitesimally low chance in the first place, can justify a trillion dollars of spending when more people die of heart attacks every year who we don't lift a finger for. If 'most Americans' understand this, it is only because they are such stupid, cowardly sheep that they'll believe anything they're told and spook at any threat. If our government wasn't trying to terrify us with ghost stories, most Americans would have the wits to weigh the costs and benefits and say 'phooey' to airline security.
How about a compromise? All of the cowardly Americans can ride on planes that have been security screened, while undergoing security screening. All of the brave, but bleeding heart liberal non-discriminatory Americans can ride on unscreened planes while not undergoing security screening. All of the brave, common-sense discriminatory Americans can ride on unscreened planes that don't allow people from Muslim nations onto said planes. Then we can all just accept what fate brings us and accept whatever comes. Everyone can have their way. Only the people who accepted the risk of death can possibly die from terrorism. Only the people who won't risk death have to undergo the humiliating and delaying airport security. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve and asked for. If we can't have our own nation, can brave, dignified Americans at least have our own security procedures? Who do we hurt but ourselves by taking our own fate into our own hands? If all passengers at risk consented to the risk, who can complain that we are taking a risk? Couldn't we satisfy all customers, like a true private market would allow? Aren't we adults who have a right to choose just how far we will go to stay safe, and not children? Why can't we have a say in how we choose to fly? We're the ones buying the tickets, aren't we? How about we, not the government, determine exactly how we fly? If there is anything left of the spirit of our Founding Fathers, that would be something 'most Americans' could get behind.
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