Don’t Touch My Junk, Bro!

"Sir, please step aside," the Travel Security Administration agent instructed me at the Nashville airport last week as I was about to fly home to San Antonio. Falling victim to "random selection," I was taken to a separate line to go through the controversial full-body scanner, the giant x-ray machine that performs what has been dubbed a "virtual strip search." Apparently I failed the search, so I had to undergo the even more controversial pat down procedure. As the stocky TSA agent slid his hands up and down my thighs and around my ass, he gave me this apologetic look that said, "I'm sorry, man. I want to be doing this as much as you want to be standing here right now." Turning up nothing - surprise, I'm not a terrorist - I put my sweatshirt back on and walked to my gate, unsure if I should have felt molested, violated, or just kind of amused. Amidst a media firestorm, civil liberties and privacy advocates have declared these new screening measures unwarranted and unconstitutional; pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle have stopped just short of calling for the head of Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In post 9/11 America, there have been gradual encroachments on individual liberties in the name of securing our nation from the threat of terrorism, but what is more troubling is that most people do not seem to care until it directly affects them. 

A little more than a month after 9/11, President Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law. The bill - which, among other provisions, granted law enforcement agencies authority to execute warrantless wiretaps and searches of email, telephone, and financial records - drew little public criticism at the time of its signing. The nation, after all, was still rolling in the horrors of that fateful Tuesday in September. To be fair to the legislators who enacted this law, they were even more shaken by what had transpired - United 93 was indeed intended for the Capitol building before crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. As the War on Terror was waged and the fog of fear that clouded the nation's collective consciousness began to dissipate, a mounting political opposition toward the PATRIOT grew over the next few years. Some of the most controversial provisions have since been amended, repealed, or declared unconstitutional. Yet most of the public outcry towards the law came from a minority compromising civil libertarians and left-leaning voters - those who were already opponents of the Bush administration's agenda. 

I could go on about these arguable infringements on civil liberties by the Bush administration. Torture, monitoring of "opposition" and religious groups, the ability to designate any American citizen suspected of terrorist activity as an enemy combatant and deprive them of their constitutional rights to due process and habeas corpus. And so on. But that would belabor my point. Though painfully misguided, George Bush's intention, I sincerely believe, was to protect America - not create some Orwell-light shadow government. Yet while these assaults on the liberties of others occurred, most of us were indifferent. While individuals were detained indefinitely, subjected to torture, and deprived of legal representation, we were more concerned with who was going to win American Idol. It's a bit discomforting that it's not until some stranger starts groping us at the airport that we as a nation start to think that the government has gone too far. 

And I don't doubt President Obama's intentions to protect America, either - you have to be a partisan hack to think any president does not want to protect the nation from a terrorist attack. However, in doing so, we are faced with a dilemma between what we ultimately value more: our security or our liberty. The new screening measures utilized by the TSA, though obviously over-the-line for many, are pretty benign in comparison to the other things our government has done in the name of protecting the nation. Like they will do continuously, determined terrorists will find ways around even these security measures, or simply forego air-related acts of terror in favor of something more viable. We will probably never be able to eliminate the threat of terrorism entirely, but we can slowly erode away our rights and liberties - and judging by current trends, we won't know it until it's far too late.