Airline travel lurks in the not-too-distant future. Airline travel is tortuous. Airline travel is degrading. Airline travel is terrible and
frightening. Airline travel is probably against the Geneva Convention.
But airline travelers are not uniformed enemies of the United States.
Airline travelers are the United States. So airline travelers do not have
any rights.
The government tells the passengers how they may fly. Passengers must be
compliant. Passengers must be patient. Passengers must be quiet.
Passengers must discard most jells, liquids, laptops (with Sony batteries).
Passengers must never joke about the ineptitude of the TSA employees. And
sure as shootin', passengers must be disarmed.
The only thing worse than an armed passenger may be one who tries to smoke
in the lavatory -- or disable the government-mandated smoke detector before
they light-up. Armed smokers, of course, have a special place in Hell
reserved for them and their bad habits and individual rights.
Airlines, similarly, have no rights either.
The government tells airlines what kind of security must be present: trained
and government salaried. The government tells airlines what routes they can
travel: published and unprotected. The government tells airlines who can
travel: those on the governments' "infallible" list of suspected terrorists
cannot. In one case, that included Sarah Zapolsky's 9-month old. (Check
Reuters for latest listings.)
All of this assumes the color of street theater when travelers realize that
not one thing -- nothing done to inconvenience, threaten, assault, or
degrade the millions of airline passengers -- has made a single passenger
any safer.
But one thing has. The passengers are emboldened. By putting on such a
show, the government has implied that something should be done in the sky to
make airline passengers safer. Although the government will never
accomplish this, the passengers are erroneously emboldened to take that
duty.
Passengers are profiling other passengers. Passengers are asking other
passengers to reveal the contents of their carry-on luggage. Passengers are
demanding other passenger's removal from certain flights because of the way
they look or act.
Passengers are making the sky safer.
Like all the other "feel-good" legislation that has gone before, congress
should repeal every rule and law intended to keep airline passengers safer
unless it is one that empowers other airline passengers. The ones that
empower the government should be thrown out the window at Flight Level 440.
And every airline passenger should be armed and authorized to remove any
other airline passenger.
That's safety. That's security.
