A great story of what happens at TSA at O’Hare.
My pained relationship with government security had started three years earlier. I had just returned to Chicago to finish my bachelor’s degree after a two-year stint in Florida. I needed a job to help pay my way through school, and the TSA’s call-back was the first one I received. It was just a temporary thing, I told myself—side income for a year or two as I worked toward a degree in creative writing. It wasn’t like a recession would come along and lock me into the job or anything.
It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism of U.S foreign policy; by day, I spent eight hours at O’Hare in a federal uniform, solemnly carrying out orders passed down from headquarters.
What Those TSA Guys Are Really SayingI hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.
Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.
There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.
Oh yeah. It’s good.
The story, that is. Not the TSA security theater.
More…
As a retired large City Police Officer and retired Correctional Officer (Max Security), I have come close to seeing every possible danger to any security environment.
I have worked County, State and federal jurisdictions and have known countless others who have worked the same or similar. The real ones, Not TSA or Homeland types.
As U.S. Citizens, we truly need to disband the “TSA” and every form of the National “Homeland Security” agencies who serve only to defy our Civil Rights.
Neither has served to accomplish anything Germany’s “Fatherland” or Russia’s “Motherland” forces have not already done towards destroying the peoples freedoms and Human Rights.