There was a time when traveling was fun and exciting. Then the excitement gradually went out of the flying part–which unfortunately is often where the traveling starts and ends. The excitement. Ah–those were the days.
I remember once I was getting out of JFK in cold weather. The security line was not very long, fortunately. A young lady was immediately in front of me. She took off a leather jacket, revealing a garment that is in a high-quality satin-like material, and, possibly consequently, in very limited quantity. Then she took off her boots (Uggs?), showing off her bare feet, lower legs, and parts of her thigh. And then she took off her belt (a wide and fashionable piece!), without ever a prompt from airport security. In all this time, she never looked back.
That imagery helped me to brave the enhanced security pat-down this summer, tested on me through a random selection process, when a TSA agent decided that it was high time that his new trainee got a new victim subject. The intimate touches I got were uncomfortable, embarrassing, until I think of others who could feel even more so. I wish they gave me the choice of using a body-scanner.
Fortunately for the terrorists, the body-scanner is only skin-deep. And these terrorists, they are smart. They learn from drug-traffickers, who have not lost in the “War on Drugs” against the powerful US government. It is a known fact that some drug-traffickers use certain body-cavities for their illicit transport!
So TSA is molesting the American traveling public just to make them feel safer, rather than actually make their traveling safer (of course they are making some companies richer, but that is for another day’s discussion). To make the traveling safe, even only to as far as known terrorist tactics go, would require that they enhance the security procedures even more.
I wonder when that enhanced-enhanced security procedure (EES, or E2S) will arrive, and in what form. And then I think of that young lady who was once in front of me in the security line. And I cringe.