A flight home for Thanksgiving is an exciting thing for a college student. Between partying with old friends and eating with your family, there is a lot to look forward to - except for the flight itself, that is.
Since Sept 11, 2001, it has become a realistic possibility in travelers' minds that their flight could be a target. I myself was paranoid on one flight last December. An untidily dressed Middle Eastern man with no carry-on luggage sat down in the isle. Making sure to stay awake the whole flight (a real struggle these days), I was pleasantly surprised when the man wished me a Merry Christmas as the fight landed. My completely unfair generalization left me a little embarrassed.
Airports too have now taken into consideration the fact that terrorism has no color. "Behavioral Profiling" is a system recently implemented at large airports such as Boston's Logan Airport. Here, in my hometown, state troopers are trained not to look at the person's skin color, but at their actions instead. If someone is acting suspicious based on the troopers' educated observations, they are permitted to question the person.
All you really need to do in this situation is cooperate, answer a few questions, and as long as you are not doing anything illegal it will just be another story to tell the family when you get home.
This opinionated profiling is obviously light-years ahead of where most travelers would like it to be, but it works! It is a common practice at international borders, used frequently to combat terror in Israel and has already stopped bombings in the United States.
As with everything, there have been a few innocent individuals not willing to cooperate. Some have ended up in handcuffs. I guess some people just think everyone else is a suspect except themselves, and they pay for it in cases like this. To observers, it would seem that anyone making that much of a fuss about answering a few questions may actually have something to hide.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union does not see it this way and has run in to preserve justice. Technically, it is actually fighting justice by making a mountain out of a molehill. But it has raised a serious question as to whether or not this is a constitutional practice.
Clearly if this was a case of assaulting every Middle Eastern person in an airport, it would be grossly unfair. But this is simply a case of airports doing the best they can with trained individuals to keep flyers safe.
This legal battle is all about improved airline safety against consensual screening. A lot of people do feel violated when they are frisked, or checked at all for that matter, and they will make noise about it.
It was widely known this Thanksgiving that various women felt violated when frisked. Typically, these women are not used to the touch of a man to begin with, so it comes as no surprise that anything above a handshake would startle them.
In the end, sure, there are going to be cases of someone not doing his or her job or abusing his or her power. But this really doesn't seem to be the case other than, maybe, a few isolated incidents. People want to feel safer while flying, and the airlines want you to feel that same safety. With stereotyping eliminated from the equation, they are doing what they can for the time being, and that's all there is to it. Just leave your weapons at the gate, have a nice flight and pipe down.
