This story will probably be all over the ‘net in a day or two, if it isn’t already, but it’s something that really needs to be read to be believed. A husband and his pregnant wife were attempting to fly out of Portland to go to a friend’s wedding when they were both pulled off for extra “security screening”…
After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, “I’m sorry…it’s…they touched my breasts…and…” That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, “What did you do to her?” Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts — to protect the American citizenry — the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side — no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who’ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. “I felt like a clown,” my wife told me later. “On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That’s when you walked up.”
Of course when I say she “told me later,” it’s because she wasn’t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day — that I was in fact a “menace.”
It’s no longer a “what if” scenario — these things are happening, all over the place, every day. Some are getting reported, many more are not. And as the author of the piece says, it’s probably too late to stop it at this point, though not too late to make our indignation known.
There are plenty of stories like this these days. I don’t know how many I’ve read where the writer describes some breach of civil liberties by employees of the state, then wraps it all up with a dire warning about what we as a nation are becoming, and how if we don’t put an end to it now, then we’re in for heaps of trouble. Well you know what? Nothing’s going to stop the inevitable. There’s no policy change that’s going to save us. There’s no election that’s going to put a halt to the onslaught of tyranny. It’s here already — this country has changed for the worse and will continue to change for the worse. There is now a division between the citizenry and the state. When that state is used as a tool against me, there is no longer any reason why I should owe any allegiance to that state.