My First Pat-down: Where's the teacher when you need her?

This...this...thing I remember.

I just flew in from our nation’s capital. You know, the place with the Pentagon and foreign embassies galore, and I have to say…the fellas in D.C. are serious about their airport security—very serious. Like serious, uniformed, guards at every check point barking, “Have your boarding pass in hand!” And TSA people shining ultraviolet flashlights into your luggage muttering, “It’s not your name I’m looking at.” Creepy, really.

So by the time I made it to the metal-detection area, I was completely taken aback, for it as it turns out this little thing called a “full body scan” is for reals. Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I’ve flown from a very large, very central US Aiport (whose initials start with DIA) to another very moderate mid-western Airport (whose name always followed, as I recall from childhood, Mutal of…) several times in the last couple of years and I’ve never seen these controversial virtual nudity machines. 

I just thought it was a bunch of hype—rumors about naked bodies through clothes—the kind of stuff that fourth grade boys used to play with their drug store “x-ray glasses.” They’d say,  “I can tell you have on white underwear,” which really required nothing short of rocket science seeing as how back in 1974 I think eight out of every eight fourth-grade girls wore white underwear. Still, it was scary. We girls knew this was some nasty stuff these boys were up to, and we usually told a teacher who confiscated the specs and told us there was no such thing as x-ray vision.

But no…turns out Mrs. O’Quinn, who was stuck on playground duty that week, was wrong. Now, thanks to technological advancement of the best kind, every fourth grade boy can get on his knees tonight and thank God because science has just made dreams come true for pre-pubescent boys. X-ray vision does exist. It’s alive and well in Dulles International Airport.

Now, I’ve stayed out of the great debates about civil rights and invasion of privacy that was THE hot topic back in November when these machines first surfaced. I guess I simply didn’t believe such a thing was possible, and even more naively I believed that if such technology did exist no self-respecting government, let alone a democracy, would allow it to be publicly installed. 

I mean, I believe in terrorists. I’m still as traumatized as any other American over nine-eleven. I believe, just as much as Virgil and Wyatt Earp ever did, that weapons shouldn’t be allowed in public where nine-year-old little girls go to shopping malls—and that no magazines other than the latest Marie Claire should be allowed onto campus in some college student’s backpack . 

And please don’t think for one minute I’m one of those guns don’t kill people people—I’ve been shooting .22’s and .32’s and 12-guages since before I was in training bras, and I KNOW guns can kill people. I appreciate a well-placed metal detector as much as any other patriot who stands and sings along with Lee Greenwood that “I’m proud to be an American” at the firework finale on the Fourth-of-July.

But the problem is that the SECOND line of that song goes “…where at least I know I’m free.” And today I’m hacked off because as big a platitude and as sappy as that song has become, I’m here to tell you that it simply is not true.

Yeah, I was free. Free to walk through a machine that scans my nude body onto a screen in an unseen observation room, or free to take a pat down. Admittedly you can’t expect too much from other world citizens—of which there are plenty at Dulles Airport—who have neither been educated in nor given  basic principle freedoms, who have never given lip service to human rights and who remain unaware of something called Civil Liberties. But were not some of us in line at x-ray this morning American citizens? Wasn’t there one other passenger flying with my this morning who has been raised in a country in which one has the right to determine and practice his or her own religion, the right to remain silent, the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of speech, of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances?

Well buddy...I'm about to ask for a REDRESS about UNDRESS. Today, as I stood lining up two...three...four...plastic bins to send down the rubber conveyor belt filled with all my personal belongings, I began to wonder what would happened if I forgot to stop:

What if— after pulling off my boots, my necklace, my bracelets, my belt, my coat and my sweater—I simply took three more steps and removed my dress, underpants and bra. It’s only another three steps—really. And then…let us not bandy words any longer… we could call it what it is—A STRIP SEARCH: a full-out, full-body, naked display of every man, woman and child that walks through security.

And as if this alone weren't enough to make a body gasp, could I just speak about the “posture” or position one must assume in order to have one’s naked image displayed for TSA to accurately assess on their flat-panel televisions—something akin to a pose most often struck for a:

A:  Photo shoot in a porn magazine

B:  Breast exam at the gynecologist’s office

C:  Death March for prisoners of war. 

Listen, Mr. TSA officer…Don’t  you stand with your arms crossed staring straight ahead like a junior Nazi officer at the door to Auschwitz barking out, “Remove your laptops! Remove your liquid items in plastic bags! Remove all shoes, belts, jewelry or other metallic devices…” and pretend that a VIRTUAL strip search is a legitimized technological option to an ACTUAL strip search—because you are wrong. The first time somebody asks one of my children to pose for the nudy-cam, I’m going to file a law suit. Last time I checked that was called child pornography—was it not?

How desensitized have we become? Has technology so overtaken our senses, so  allowed us to remove ourselves emotionally from a factual process that we no longer bat an eye at what is a legalized, systematic display of a person’s unclothed body and a grossly inappropriate invasion of privacy.

But nobody batted an eye.

I watched people squirm, laugh, and joke and then spread their legs and put their hands behind their heads like some sort of war criminal stripped naked in front of a firing squad and undergo this process simply because there was no other practical choice. There was nobody there to offer an alternative, nobody to give them an option. They were run through like cattle at a meat packing plant. And suddenly, in my eyes, it felt like a sick Twilight Zone reenactment of  the processing house at Treblinka or Auschwitz.

And nobody batted an eye.

In fact, check out the TSA page on body image scanners. No surprise, nearly 80% of flyers said they would be willing to undergo the full-body scan. But the fact is: there is no “willing” about it. It’s “Either line up for the virtual strip search or get a pat down.” There’s NOT a choice. Ask me. And the looks the guards and passengers give you as you dare to grind to a stop the giant cattle chute of technology is nearly enough to make you say, “Skip it, skip it…just joking, boys.” Except for me it wasn't.

Listen Madam Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano:

You want to see me nude? Then have the guts to ask to look at my bare body in the flesh. You want to see my naked body to see if I’m smuggling drugs or weapons? Then snap out of your euphemized, euthanized, desensitized un-world and ask me to strip.

I truly wonder…if my fellow citizens would have been asked to strip— to actually, not virtually, “remove all items of clothing” before entering the terminal area—I wonder if they would have risen up in protest. Or would they simply have endured one more stripping (no pun intended) of their individual rights in order to make a plane.

Am I alone with George Orwell and Margaret Atwood who force us to ask “HOW FAR, people?” How much personal integrity and privacy are we willing to surrender in the name of technology and worse yet in the name of terrorism? When are we going to realize that 97 percent of the nation is being asked to undergo a strip search to prevent 3 percent of the terrorists from sneaking a bomb on board.

Is there not something better? Somebody please tell me before I despair of purple mountains majesties,  sweet land of liberties, and home of the braves! Where are you Lee Greenwood, now?

How long is it before the fourth-grade boy on your daughter’s play ground isn’t fooling around any more? How long is it until you walk down the street and know that any pair of dime-store glasses is now the “real deal.” Will it be illegal to look through a person’s clothing at their naked body? Can perpetrators get actual (here’s an oxymoron) real-time virtual thrills from a neighborhood park bench?

C’mon, I’m not joking. Seriously,  just flip through a Sky Mall magazine and look at the micro video recorder glasses and bugging devices that are available now to the general public. Stuff that America gasped in shock over when Richard Nixon tried them out on George McGovern. Complete lack of integrity, complete stripping of civil liberties, complete lack of business and political ethics that WATERGATE WAS. 

And there’s another key word: WAS. Today, in this nation overflowing with virtual voyeurism, I’m afraid nobody would bat an eye at Tricky Dick's little spy games.

Our youth, and slowly by association our elders, have grown so very accustomed to seeing their images reproduced in a dozen different mediums, through a hundred virtual networks, and hearing their voices played on a thousand different recordable devices, that they no longer see the marvel of it, gasp at the wonder of it, or flinch at the invasion of it.  I’m fearful, if we don’t regain our senses soon,  that one fine day, not long from now, our senses will simply go completely numb. 

And maybe, right before they do, some of us older ones will remember that there was a time when we “just knew” something was wrong. We may not have known what it was called—we were too young for words like civil liberties and invasion of privacy--and we didn’t have the power to stop it on our own…but at least in fourth grade, way back long ago, we had the sense to tell the teacher. And she could always do something about it. 

But I was on my own this morning at Dulles. The playground monitor was nowhere to be found, and not one other soul seemed to even care. 

Cue Lee Greenwood on five, four, three...