Protesting about Protests

Friday, November 19, 2010

From today’s Toronto Star :

Heather Mallick thinks that “Something has gone terribly wrong if you can’t get on a plane without your unspeakables being stroked by the plastic-gloved hands of a paid stranger.”

Remember, we are focused on Clear Thinking; this isn’t about politics or profits; just logic.

Here is the only real test about whether you’d prefer to be screened, scanned, naked, patted down, grope or whatever:

Imagine that you are on a commercial flight from Here to There. It’s easy enough for you to do – just think of the last commercial flight you were on.

Now imagine that the guy/gal from the seat in front of you gets up and, standing within arms reach of you announces in a loud voice: “I have a gun/bomb/dynamite”.

Or else imagine that the bomb has just gone off; a large chunk of plane is missing and all sorts of debris is being sucked out of the hole, and you can see the stars (or the sun) from the hole in the side. You are weightless.

Now ask yourself this question: “Given that I have no more than 5 minutes left to live, would I be willing to rewind this scenario and have a more rigorous pre-boarding search of everybody, no exceptions?”.

I thought so.

The trouble is this: We can’t go back and ask any of the thousands of passengers who died as a direct result of saboteurs smuggling deadly tools onto commercial flights.

It is all very well to sit in an armchair and scream about civil liberties. Those who would scream the loudest in favor of screening are not able to scream at all.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

And then today’s Star carries a comment by a traveller:

“I think there ought to be two flights,” said Jacksonville, Fla., native Marc Gruber, 53, who was at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport. “One for people who want to be scanned and one for people who don’t want to be scanned.”

Right on!

Especially as the do-not-scan flights would occur about once a week, as distinct from once per hour for the rest of us.

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