Get Used To The Tighter Security

This is going to be a stressful few weeks for a lot of people: some flying in here for a home or touristic holiday, some flying out to be with Mainland family members.

And if you believe the alarmist stuff you read, you’re going to be showing your all and absorbing X-rays at airport body scanners, or having TSA pat-down inspectors running a hand up your dress, or into your crotch, or squeezing your breasts, or checking your butt.

The fear and indignation factor has gotten ridiculous. As presidential adviser David Axelrod said about an unrelated issue – but it’s apt for this one: “We deal with the world as we find it.”

Right now we find the world populated in a minor but dangerous manner with misguided folks who think blowing up airliners filled with mostly non-engaged, innocent travelers is their sworn duty. They are nut cases, but they do keep inventing new ways to be nuts. We are forced to invent new ways to stop them. First, we had simple metal detectors, then removal of shoes, the explosives hand-sniffers and now the full body scans.

I’m neither afraid nor indignant. I’ve read enough to know the scans won’t give me cancer. I don’t care if somebody’s seeing my genitals on the screen. Americans tend to be a bit too uptight, anyway, about nudity – although some almost get there at Kaimana Beach. People who have metal implants have been going through pat-downs for years. Big deal.

Some activist groups are urging everyone to refuse the body scanners this holiday period and gum up the TSA search sessions. Well, OK, but then many of them will miss their flights. So I say let them gum up! The rest of us will go gleefully through. Apass for pilots and cabin attendants? Hey, think about that Army major who killed all his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood.

It may be true, as search critics say, that the bombers will next work on ways to hide the bad stuff in body cavities. But I figure TSA knows that and already is at work on the next detection system.

I don’t know where this all ends. I do know that body scans, shoe removal and pat-downs are part of – in Mr. Axelrod’s words – dealing with the world as we find it.