Law professor Paul Campos decries the folly of “security theater” at U.S. airports as a purely symbolic response to the ever present threat of terrorism within commercial aviation. His essay appears in the January 9 Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Undressing the Terror Threat”.
He observes that about 6,700 Americans die, on average, every day. Nothing approaching the invasiveness of airport security is imposed on our daily lives in an effort to prevent these randomly occurring deaths, including deaths by murder, suicide and traffic accidents.
The reason is completely logical, yet the logic is not applied to the wanding of your sweet innocent grandmother by a TSA agent.
Writes Campos, a University of Colorado academic:
“We seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars. For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally avoid discussing what ought to be considered an ‘acceptable’ number of traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would require treating voters as adults—something which at present seems to be considered little short of political suicide.”
Treating voters as adults? What a concept. The politics of fear that the Obama White House loves to engage – ”If we don’t pass this or that into law right now, ASAP, look out, America …” — not only covers up the root causes of our vulnerability to Islamic jihadists but conveniently keeps the drums beating for “health care reform” as well.
The politics of fear distracts most Americans from our weakening stature on the world stage. The politics of fear minimizes the shoddiness of our intelligence collection, profiling and analysis, wherein real security occurs, focusing instead on how much hair gel and mouthwash you’re trying to bring aboard an airplane.
Finally, the politics of fear makes it possible for people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry “I Like A Light Skinned President” Reid to hijack the U.S. economy and stoke the fires of Socialism by exploiting the “outrage” over the less than 2% of the American population that might, or might not, be in need of medical insurance coverage.*
So it comes to this. A hard working, law abiding citizen trying to fly to a meeting is treated as a potential threat to aviation security (off with your shoes, capitalist swine!) and is vilified as heartless because his employment package provides medical and dental insurance.
If we consider 43,000 annual traffic deaths “acceptable”, what’s so appalling about five million people who are very much alive but merely uninsured?