Spoken Like a Happy Slave of the Totalitarian State

During my recent trip to France, I was questioned, patted down, and searched every time I went through airport security in Los Angeles, Newark, Halifax, Montreal, and Paris. My luggage was opened and thoroughly examined, and my dialysis machine was dusted for drugs. I got so incredibly tired of going into a back room with two butch gals and having to pull up my shirt and pull down my pants so that they could gawk at my dialysis tubing and insulin pump.

Finally, in Halifax, I said something like this to two security gals: "I would almost be OK with this invasion of privacy if the whole terrorist bullshit was real. But it's all made up. The U.S. government was behind 9/11 so that it could control people like this." Without skipping a beat, the more senior of the two said that though that may be true, it has given her and a lot of other people jobs.

Oh, my gawd! Is that what it's really all about! Three wars, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of people maimed or disturbed for life, millions of others grieving or destitute, the wholesale trashing of the Constitution and of truth, the further tightening of the police state, the incarceration of thousands without charge and without trial, the torture of countless others, the waste of $3 trillion--but, hey, I've got a job.

I said nothing in reply. This woman is living on another planet and in a different dimension. We do not have the necessary touchdown points to discuss this matter.

When I told a sympathetic someone about this incident, he said I was lucky, that I could have been whisked away and never heard from again. He's right. I'm sure that would have happened had I said this in the "land of the free" rather than in Canada.