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• Friday, July 11, 2008 10:43 AM

  We need a plan for some civil disobedience.

  Sure, some of the TSA officers are petty bureaucrats who get off by exercising their "authority" to make our lives miserable. (Tampa International is particularly horrible.)

  That said: the problem isn't the agents doing the checks. They are told to enforce the rules. Often times, the rules are made stupider than necessary to make them easier to enforce and less ambiguous. Instead of coming up with a complex algorithm to explain the types of knives that are and aren't okay, they just say "no knives whatsoever". Hey, at least we're a nation of laws and not of men; the alternative would open the door to race, gender, and age-based profiling for who got to carry on danger items and who didn't. So everyone has to follow the same stupid rules.

  At base the problem is the people who make the stupid rules. The solution to this problem might seem like complaining to your congressperson; but I don't think that'll work. No congressperson is ever going to want to be on the record as voting against security regulations, even if those security regulations are a farce that don't particularly decrease the (already tiny) risk of something bad happening on a plane.

  I wonder what sorts of acts of civil disobedience might be used to protest these stupid rules? Like, what would Ghandi do? Maybe we should all start going to the airports as close to naked as possible, and carrying through as little as possible (like a small wallet or satchel). They're starting to use those awful machines that virtually strip you naked: let's just play the game better.

  —elbel Read elbel's other letters
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