Preparing for Flight

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.