In Between

They seem to be a punching bag for both the left and the right. Workers of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) are America’s number one group we love to hate (after al Qaeda). There are jokes about how we have to strip down and let them molest us just to get on our plane. You can find dozens of stories of the Transportation Security Officers (TSO) going overboard (sometimes exaggerated), and humiliating people with certain medical conditions.

But they are really between a rock and a hard place, on two fronts.

 

 

On the first front: discrimination. If they pat down a blue-eyed, blond-haired, Caucasian, middle-aged woman but let a young, dark-skin man named Mohammad go through without scrutiny, the right yells at them as being overly Politically Correct with misplaced priorities (You know how much I hate this). If they single out the Arab-looking males, the left yells at them for racially profiling. They can’t win! Find people that are looking and acting suspicious. What if an Arab man is looking suspicious? Racial Profiling! What if a Caucasian Woman looks suspicious? Political Correction! Lose-Lose every time. You can’t do your job without being a bleeding-heart liberal or a bigoted conservative.

 

 

The second front: Following orders. How closely are you supposed to follow the book and how often should you take common sense into play and freely think? If a 10-year-old boy has the same name as someone on the “Do Not Fly List”, what do you do? Most likely, the kid has the same name as another person and is clearly not a danger. If you let him through with no hassle, you didn’t follow the rules! What’s the point of rules if you throw them out at will? If you follow the rules and deny passage, you’re some idiot who can’t think for themselves and thinks a child is a terrorist! I’m guessing there are some protocols to verify the identities of the people to make sure a baby is not a terrorist. Or maybe not…

 

 

Maybe we should cut the TSA some slack. If terrorist snuck through and killed 100 people, we would be mad that they hadn’t done their job. But then we complain when the follow the book. Maybe the book needs revising to include some more common sense measures. The system needs fixing, yes, but these people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.