Homeland Security - Big Brother

I am so angry right now I can not stop vibrating internally. Something snapped today and I think as Americans, we need to stop our complacent attitudes and start looking carefully at how our rights are being infringed upon.

I fly frequently because I have family scattered all over the country. The benefits of that are airline elite status, upgrades and many comforts that average people don't always get. But, like all people, I have to go through this insane airport screening. First, we allowed ourselves to be checked for metals and our bags scanned. Sometimes our bags were searched. I have had items removed (children's rounded edged scissors, nail clippers). Solution - check your bags. OK, so now we have to pay to check bags. Then we had limits on liquids. How many people have lost items from that? A $10 bottle of special shampoo here, a medication there - expense has been enormous if you look at an entire population. The number of TSA agents has increased. Who pays their salaries? Slowly and insidiously we are being more and more controlled by a government that has created a fear factor. Does it make sense that on board, I can get a can of Diet Coke and break it in half and create a weapon but I cannot carry on my toenail clippers? Consider the number of flights daily in the world and how many of those are compromised by terrorists?

Scan my bags, OK. Scan me for metals, OK. I won't like it but I will tolerate it. But this new body scan that makes you raise your hands above your head while they see you under your clothes is not OK. But today was the final straw, for some reason I was selected to be "patted down." So the female TSA officer comes over and tells me she has to touch my breasts but just with the back of her hands. Standing out in front of the entire airport. I said no. That was not OK with me. That is an invasion of my privacy as a citizen. So she said she would have to call her supervisor who came over and announced loudly "well, that is all right, she just won't make her flight today." By then I was ballistic. So they called security who told me if I didn't cooperate he would send me on the bus out of the airport! I asked him if he wouldn't care if someone wanted to pat his wife down in public and touch her breasts. He gave me more lip. I told the TSA person to take me into a private room and they did their pat down. What for?? My dangerous under wire bra which I am going to turn into a mechanism to pick the lock of the door into the cockpit?

If you know me, then you know that I am slow to blow but this just turned me into a real bitch. I couldn't even believe how I lipped off. I mean, I could have been back in college yelling in a Vietnam war protest at the "pigs." I have just had it with the treatment of humans as cattle in airport security. I am frightened by the invasion of our privacy by Homeland Security. We need to reclaim our country, our privacy and our dignity. I still had to go through the "procedures" but I sure didn't do it without a public display of my opinions and I am not embarrassed, but proud. I have names and badge numbers and believe me, I will write my letters.