Over the last year or so I have done a bit more airplane travel than your average bear, not many international flights I grant you, but enough domestic travel to be kicking myself not to be a member of one of the proliferation of rewards clubs for people who frequently fly on an airplane. By now the number of miles I have traveled may have earned me, oh, I dunno, a Bik Biro or a box of tissues or something. The Frequent Flyers clubs big-up themselves when it comes to promoting what’s available but I don’t know a lot of people who actually are ‘rewarded’ much valuable stuff for their many hours being cooped up in a metal box or sitting drinking absolutely dreadful coffee in airports for the many hours that the flight is delayed. If you work for an airline please comment here and tell me I’m wrong. Don’t misunderstand me, I love free shit as much as the next person (as long as they’re not some weird-o imbued with a perverted Christian work ethic that says that anything you get for nothing isn’t worth having) but I don’t think it’s really a reward to stick with the one airline and get a disposable pen after flying 20, 000 miles in a calender year.
But what I was thinking is that there is something wrong with the screening at airports for people who might want to do harm to either the passengers or crew of the flights I have taken. I assume that it’s a fairly standard procedure internationally. The US would have developed a system that works for it’s citizens and everyone else copies it they were the nation that has failed the most at preventing aircraft-related terrorism so they have a vested interest in appearing to be at the top of the tree in this field.
Here’s what I reckon happens. And this is apart from the obvious. The obvious being you drop some of your luggage at a chute to be loaded into the belly of the plane and they run it past various scans and checks to ascertain whether it contains anything that might explode in the cargo hold. Surely that little declaration you make when you check the luggage in isn’t everything.
“Does this contain explosives or explosive materials ?”
“Nope”
“OK, we’ll put it inside the plane with everyone else’s similarly-declared explosive-free boxes and suitcases”
There’s probably some x-ray machine that the suitcase whips past on the chute where an underpaid airline employee and/or lower level Government functionary may get to have a glance at the contents of the bag. There may be one of those little friendly dogs that will walk all over the top of the pile of cases before they’re stowed, there may be a myriad of hi-tech computer scans before your stuff is stowed in the belly of the ‘plane. It can’t just be your declaration – surely ?
But the idiocy of this system of preventing terrorists from boarding your plane is that everyone is treated like a potential terrorist. They can run my bag of dirty socks and soiled underwear, creased shirts and the book I was going to read during the flight through as many different tests as they like but where’s the sense in having each and every passenger subjected to the time-wasting and demeaning scrutiny when they are trying to get into the plane. It take’s frickin’ forever to get onto an airplane. You queue up with your carry-on luggage, the stuff you want to have near you on the plane, of course the book you wanted to read has already been scanned by many different scanners and a little beagle has walked over the bag but you might want a laptop computer, an iPod, a digital (or film) camera NOT thrown around by grumpy baggage handlers close by to amuse yourself or pretend to work with for the duration of the flight and your period in the forced detention centre they call a departure lounge. After you have made it close to the gate you are asked to unpack a lot of your stuff, pop a laptop into a separate tray and some people voluntarily start to undress, they put their shoes and belts onto a tray along with all the other stuff that will make their terrorism-detectors go ‘beep’, ‘beep’ ‘beep’ – your small change, your watch and wallet, jewelery, pens (I don’t know if the freebie Biro will set off the bomb-detector they don’t have a lot of metal in them) all the while there’s about 4 people at the gate watching you and sizing you up for ‘special treatment’ after you have passed this first test.
So here’s the thing. These people who are subjecting you with their special anti-bomber vision are from the same demographic as you (and I’m being very generalist here, but it’s based on my many hours spent catching these planes over the last few years). It’s quite likely that you’re are a middle class Caucasian person and so are the scrutineers. Doesn’t anyone see the flaw in this? Let’s assume I am a complete racist bastard and I think everyone from a different background looks suspicious and appears to me to be a potential terrorist. There’s no reason to assume that the people employed at airports aren’t just as biased and bigoted as the rest of their demographic so .. They’ll probably take a closer look at some people than others (but why the hell are the newspapers so frequently reporting that little old ladies are being cavity searched? is this some balancing act to make this ‘plane seem to be of universal application or is Al-Quaeda or the Taliban recruiting OAPs and schoolkids into their secret terrorist cells).
It’s wrong I say, wrong. We shouldn’t be herded past people who are like us to root out those fellow frequent flyers who want to subvert our way of life. We should have the CCTV cameras, the metal detectors, the doors and the gates staffed by people who are our opposite.
Here’s where the controversy begins.
If we as a flying community have decided (either directly or otherwise) that terrorism will be inflicted upon us by a group who claim to be making the world a better place for Muslims and non-Caucasians who better to be able to pick members of that small section of humanity than non-white Muslims.
How the hell would we middle-class middle-Australian middle-everythings know who is shifty-looking, who is doing their best to become a martyr and get their 40 virgins, I’ve already said that everyone who doesn’t look like me is shifty/suspicious/’off’ and should be taken away and given extra scrutiny and then put on another plane. Set a thief to catch a thief I say, the dudes at the gate should all be muscular youths from a middle eastern country or bearded older men from local mosques and a whole lot of those women who are completely covered from head to foot.
Theses are the ideal people to be watching the TV screens to pick out who is a potential danger to themselves and the rest of society. We need to get the FBI or the Dept. Of Homeland Security in the United States to get rid of their out-dated notion of racial profiling and get some different cultures into their anti-terrorist club.
Anyway, I think I should write more on this after I have had a chance to look at the results of the current elections in Afghanistan. There may be a shit-load of potential new recruits to my Cultural Profiling programme, there’s going to be a few people who may not have been able to swindle a eat into the parliament there and get jobs for all their mates and rellies looking to put their noses into a different trough and this may well be the perfect trough for ’em
Back later