I was (yet again) dragging my stuff through the airport – and the whole TSA line-management exercise. I couldn’t help but be a bit disenchanted. I don’t particularly hate the TSA…okay, actually, that’s not true. I kinda do because of things like this. Or this, written by the same author, a former TSA screener for six years. He has a blog here about the full panoply of stupidity by “the mighty TSA.” I figure when even the comedians are pointing out just how glaringly inane the batch of travel regulations are, it might be time to take a second look at what we’re doing.
As I watched an overly officious man (go figure) shuffle people around in line, a half-formed thought coalesced in my head:
We have become a nation of pants-shitting cowards.
Whoa! Whoa, Dale! That seems harsh, you’re thinking. Well, hold on to your hat and let me tell you what I really think.
I should be clear that when I say “we,” I’m not talking about me or my friends. We’re the people the rest of you call when you want disputes settled by violence – when you’ve decided that either diplomacy has failed, or simply that it’s okay to use force, including killing other human beings, as a method of solving a problem. Note well: I am also including my civilian law-enforcement friends, who are “close enough to the military” (and I’ll explain more on why that’s a problem sometime later).
Now just a cotton-picking minute! You’re thinking. And at this point, I should also define the “you” I’m talking about. Here’s an easy test: if you’re wondering if this “you” might be you, or if it might apply to you, or if you are offended by the above, then it probably does. In short, if you haven’t served, are afraid of violence, have never been in a fight, and/or think guns are icky, and the TSA is a good idea – then you’re probably exactly who I’m talking about when I say pants-shitting coward.
But please, don’t take it the wrong way. Let me explain what I mean and why I say it. Standing alone, it seems rather unnecessarily provocative; and the talk about “my friends and I using violence” sounds unnecessarily belligerent, like some kind of tough guy bravado. Here’s the reality, though: on 9-11, some very bad people – terrorists – flew planes into buildings and killed over 3,000 American men, women, and children.
I didn’t know any of them personally, but let me state this rather plainly: if a group of men, women, or some other society, kills three-thousand Americans, for whatever reasons they think are justifiable, you can count me among those who think it is both legally, morally, and ethically justifiable to go hunt the first group of people down and kill them. In international law, jurists far more steeped in these issues than I use terms like casus belli and jus ad bellum. I’m not going to belabor just war theory here – it’s just so far beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that given the strength of my conviction, I feel it would be hypocritical to ask that someone else’s son or daughter take my place in line, so like my father, and his father before him, I volunteered and I went, even in my mid-thirties with four children at the time. And no, I don’t think it makes me morally superior than anyone, even a pacifist. In some sense, I respect them the most. At least they’re philosophically consistent. It’s the hypocrites I can’t stand.
“Well, it’s rather something, isn’t it?” said the man in front of me in line. He looked toward the overbearing gentleman from the TSA, obviously some kind of manager from his demeanor and commands to the bevy of highly-trained security professionals who were checking everyone’s plan tickets and licenses, which, evidently, somehow prevents bombs from getting onto and detonating aboard airplanes… I was both laughing and crying. The TSA folks standing around were, (a) almost all overweight, (b) unarmed, (c) and completely incapable of stopping an angry chihuahua from getting by, much less someone with training and an intention to bust through them.
The TSA supervisor was shuttling people around, barely disguised impatience in his voice. He looked like a cop at a traffic intersection, waving his hand, hailing people forward like cars at a construction site:
“Please move forward. Keep coming forward, please. Until I say stop, please keep – are you alone, ma’am?” He stopped a young woman abruptly.
“Yes.”
“Okay-down-the-end, please. PLEASE keep moving forward! Next line, sir. Yes, right there.”
I looked at the gentleman in front of me.
“I really think we need the folks at Disneyland who manage the lines; they’re experts at this,” I said as I put my things in one of the trays and began to disrobe. I spoke only loud enough for the man to hear me and maybe one or two people nearby. He looked around quickly and then snickered.
I couldn’t help myself and kept on.
“All for nothing, too. This is completely pointless.” He looked nervous now. I wanted to go on, but it just wasn’t worth it. Now, here’s the point at which I issue the disclaimer. I’ve spent most of a lifetime in the military, so one could reasonably say thinking about physical and personal security is something more than just a passing consideration.
It’s pointless for a very simple reason: anyone who was sufficiently committed to could walk into an airport tomorrow and kill far more people than are on any particular plane, with much more devastating effects on transportation security. If a person finally smuggled a bomb on a plane, as has been tried, and managed to kill all 300 or so people on board, it would be a tragedy, for certain. But from both a strategic and tactical perspective, it would affect only one flight of one airline – and that well after the plane was already in the air and away.
On the other hand, with all of the security theater going on with TSA, we have vastly larger lines and bigger crowds of people gathered, long before they ever hit the fairly pointless screening. In other words, if someone really wanted to do some damage, they could simply take a suitcase filled with Semtex, C4, TNT, or whatever, in a roll aboard suitcase and leave it right near one of those giant lines. Then, walk away and detonate. The devastation would certainly rival any takedown of a plane AND – more importantly – it would shut down the entire airport, not just ruin the fortunes of one particular flight. It would also push security further out away from the airport.
I suspect I am one of a relatively small group of Americans who have flown into two different war zones in commercial aircraft on multiple occasions. I am certainly not unique as I saw a number of contractors when I flew into Baghdad International Airport on the daily Royal Jordanian Air flight from Amman. I did it twice. The security flying out of Baghdad gives one a real perspective on what true security looks like when the threat of a car bomb is very real. I left Camp Liberty, which isn’t really more than a few miles from Baghdad International Airport. My recollection is it was a 10-15 minute ride, but most of it is circuitous only because of how the area was walled off from the roads nearby. We had to leave the camp 4 hours before our flight because of the security. It went like this: drive car down the road to armed Iraqi military checkpoint. Driver is questioned, all passengers are required to provide identification and plane tickets, as well as a letter that accompanies their visa, which was required to get in the country in the first instance. Words are exchanged and you move on in between concrete barriers as you approach another checkpoint. At this one, you wait in a line that goes up to a small building, actually a series of several of them, not unlike a series of toll booths, but with longer and bigger buildings, and fewer of them (and only one lane, as I recall). You were going to have to leave the car and walk through both buildings. First you waited until the dog cleared your car, then you would go back and pull it up to the next building, maybe 50 meters forward and then you would get out of the car with your papers and go inside. I don’t remembered what happened there, but it was some relatively inconsequential administrative matter. Back in the car and on to the airport. Once there, you took all of your bags out and they were x-rayed before you even got into the airport. We were separately x-rayed before we went in the building. Then, after checking your bags, you went to your gate. Before boarding there you were x-rayed and patted down, thoroughly, (the subject of many jokes among vets and old salty contractors who would joke about how it resembled a proctology exam), and your carry on bags were also x-rayed. You then walked out to your flight and everyone’s luggage was staged on the runway near the aircraft. You were required to go stand by your bags and I can’t even imagine what would happen if there was a bag without a person attached to it. Didn’t happen in any of my times flying there. You walked your bag to the aircraft and handed it personally to the baggage handler. You had your tickets checked again and you could finally be seated.
THAT is what security looks like if you’re trying to stop someone from blowing up a plane and you mean it. I’ve never been to Israel but I understand flying El Al isn’t all that different. I’ve also found similar traveling in the middle east during a high threat time, though not quite as extreme with the route to the airport.
Now this may all seem rather grim, but that is the reality of security. That no one wants to acknowledge this strikes me as fundamentally more dangerous than exposing the flaws because the kabuki dance going on right now at these miserable TSA mock-security checkpoints provides simply the illusion of security, not actual security. Here’s the truly ironic part about all of it: the 9-11 hijackers didn’t even take down planes with bombs, yet we’re primarily protecting against that threat (or any possible plane takeover), as if that’s what happened on 9-11. It’s not. And neither Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) nor Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab (the underwear bomber) were caught in airport security screening (to be fair, I have to say that both men came from overseas: Reid from Paris to Miami in December 2001 and Farouk from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. On the other hand, I’ve been through security in both of those countries, including both Paris airports right around the time Farouk did; their security struck me at the time as being very similar to ours). In both cases it was passengers who subdued the men immediately upon any sign that something was out of the ordinary. Farouk also had tipped himself off about as much as anyone could and the massive security apparatus we built after 9-11 fucked it up once again and completely missed him. Janet Napolitano openly admitted that the entire system had failed, but only after she had first tried to tell the public that the security system had worked in the immediate aftermath. The President had to make a statement about it and questions were raised later about whether Napolitano had actually been following White House talking points on the incident.
What got exploited on 9-11 was a paradigm, a mindset that had started in the 1970’s when political hijackings of planes were not all that uncommon. I know because I can remember watching several of them on TV. Let me rephrase that – they were certainly uncommon as a per capita occurrence, but they happened with more frequency than anything like 9-11. They were common enough that the FAA even developed a special transponder code for pilots to squawk if they were hijacked. The general guidance was to go along with it. THAT is what the 9-11 hijackers exploited. For God’s sake, they only had boxcutters. They didn’t even have guns. As further proof of my point, it’s worth remembering that Flight 93 had already been taken over and everyone was just “going along” until they found out what had happened with the other flights. Once they did, to their eternal credit, they launched a coordinated counterattack to take back control of the plane.
The fact is that no one is ever going to be able to exploit that “gap” again. Again, if you want proof, notice how many attempts have been foiled by TSA (note their 97% failure rate at detecting weapons above), as opposed to how many times passengers have now kicked the ever-living shit out of anyone who even pretends they’re going to do something. THAT’S who has actually foiled subsequent attempts, not the idiot TSA.
I was trying to explain this to a rather eminent gentleman from Europe the other night over drinks in Boston and he was discussing his concern about the Syrian refugee crisis – and the statistical likelihood that some of the 1.5 million refugees were likely terrorists. I was rather non-committal until he brought up the incidents on 9-11 and I began this discussion, including using the term “pants shitting cowards.”
This finally brings me to main point of this essay: the fact that we – or “you” to reinforce my earlier point – have largely outsourced are personal security to others, either in the form of the TSA, the military, or even the cops. This is a complete repudiation of the values upon which this country was founded. If that seems like hyperbole, allow me to remind the dear reader that during the birth of our nation, we were occupied by the greatest military the world had ever known, the Army and Navy of Great Britain. In the 1700’s, while both the Spanish and the French were formidable, no one talked about the “sun never setting” on their Empires. The British occupied this country, had troops quartered in our very houses, were backed by the Royal Navy – for which we had absolutely no match – and yet we defeated both. Yes, we had support from allies who saw an opportunity to stick it to the Brits, but the impetus to do so came because Americans – the colonists as a whole – refused to back down to the British military.
The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage’s aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or olderowned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.
Dave Kopel, Administrative and Regulatory Law News (American Bar Association). Vol. 37, no. 4, Summer 2012.
This is just one example, but there are legions more. There was the “Powder Alarm,” in which a small British force of 260 sneaked up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder stored in the Charlestown Powder House. In response, Twenty-Thousand – (yes, I put that in caps for a reason) – 20,000 colonists/militiamen began to march on Boston. In part because they had heard erroneous reports the British had fired on their fellow colonists, which information was corrected, they stood down and war did not begin right then, in September of 1774. It would take until April of the next year during the attempted seizure of hidden arms in Lexington and Concord before the war would finally start.
Regarding my point about self-defense and Americans outsourcing their security, look how the colonists viewed the matter at the founding of the Republic:
Derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke, the ideology underlying all forms of American resistance was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights; from the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant.
The British government was not, in a purely formal sense, attempting to abolish the Americans’ common law right of self-defense. Yet in practice, that was precisely what the British were attempting. First, by disarming the Americans, the British were attempting to make the practical exercise of the right of personal self-defense much more difficult. Second, and more fundamentally, the Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government. To the Americans, and to their British Whig ancestors, the right of self-defense necessarily implied the right of armed self-defense against tyranny.
Id., (emphasis added).
While I’ve already had my say on gun control, it’s important to recognize the values underlying the right to keep and bear arms. It is inherently part of the right of self-defense. It was crucial to settlers in the 18th century, not merely as some idyllic notion from dead philosophers, but as a practical matter of living in those times. The counter-argument – the one of the coward – is that we don’t live in those times – as if our security were something to be given over and outsourced to benevolent overlords in government because our forefathers were able to create, over time, sufficient security that everyone no longer has to be able to fend for themselves. I would respectfully submit that is exactly what is wrong with our country.
Imagine for a second if every high school student graduated able to fend for themselves out in nature.
Just mull it over for a moment. What would happen to the rolls of welfare – and the role of welfare? What would happen to the diabetes’ epidemic that is now racing to claim our children, break our medical system, and annihilate our country’s economy? What would happen to the country’s debt if everyone were self-sufficient and social programs were necessary only for the most unfortunate, those unable to physically care for themselves?
I keep telling people that I think the education system is fundamentally broken (and it is, but again, another time for that). My primary piece of evidence for it is that in all of the arguments about common core, how to teach math, or whether we ought to be emphasizing the sciences, no one has ever mentioned the most important goal – nay, moral requirement of education, both parental and by the state-as-surrogate – and that is graduating students who are fully independent, self-sufficient adults. It’s hysterical to me, in the “holy-shit-this-can’t-be-real” kind of way, to observe that our high schools churn out children – not young adults.
My kids have all completed that journey, so I get it. And I’m not saying I expect fully-formed adults at the end of their secondary education. What I am saying is that if they’re allowed to vote at eighteen, and if we treat them as adults for all legal purposes, shouldn’t the state have a reciprocal obligation to produce an educated, independent, self-sufficient adults? It’s almost as if the State wants only more dependency. I know this: I was bound and determined to make sure mine were capable of taking care of themselves. If push comes to shove and their mother and I both die in some horrible freak individual accidents, that will be their reality.
None of this should not be taken to mean that I think we’re all islands unto ourselves. In fact, it’s obvious as a matter of how we’re wired that humans are social creatures. We need each other’s companionship to be both productive and happy, but circumstances can arise, and independent functionality isn’t merely a “nice to have,” optional set of skills. The moment a man or woman has given up both their ability and their right to fend for themselves and those they love, they are no longer fully-formed human beings. Yes, that seems even harsher than before, but I know it perfectly well because I’ve lived it.
This brings me to the final point of this piece, although I suspect I’ll be writing about this subject for quite some time, until – God willing – a lot more American come to understand this the way I do. We have entire generations of citizens who are fundamentally incapable of taking care of themselves; who, if dropped far from the niceties and conveniences of civilization, or if their cars break down in a remote area, or their cell-phone runs out of juice, are completely and irrevocably fucked. Or, if something happens to their government subsistence, they are going to be unable to put food on their table for their families.
They have outsourced their own personal security and that of their children (if they are adults), and those they love, to the vagaries and whims of whatever local government official decides to come help – or not. If that petty bureaucrat can be reached. Or bothered. Or get there in time to make one whit of a difference.
Of course, when I say this, people will instantly think of someone they know with a serious physical limitation, be it a physical or mental disability, and consider me some flint-hearted douche. I spent this past weekend at the Working Wounded Games, helping Dave Wallach, Sarah Olsen, and many other wonderful volunteers help run the fourth annual competition for adaptive athletes. People with serious physical limitations, be it a missing arm or leg, or multiple variations, cerebral palsy, you name it, come together and compete in a CrossFit Games-inspired format, with multiple events and tests, all scaled and judged for each individual’s particular challenge. It included events like a one-armed deadlift ladder, a wheelchair sled drag, and a host of similar events. It is an amazing demonstration of courage because the reality of the limitations means that a lot of the competitors will attempt things at the outer margins of their limits, yet all will win by taking the challenge, regardless of outcome. Consider the difference between viewing their injuries or conditions on the one hand as limitations requiring some benevolent overlord to feed and care for them, and on the other treating them as physical challenges around which they can adapt themselves and still complete amazing feats of strength and endurance, pushing their capacity as far as they can with what they have. The difference in views is subtle, but profound.
Cowardice and Courage are twins, born of the same parent, Fear. People fear failing, of being embarrassed, of being judged. We communicate this to our children in a million subtle ways, but how different to view failure as a necessary step on the path to success, including independence and self-sufficiency?
The difference between cowardice and courage is simply one of choice, of free will, of deciding to do something even in the face of overwhelming fear. I learned about this from a 10 year old. No, this isn’t some feel good story of some triumphant act by a kid, it’s a conversation when I was 9 with my then best-friend John Crowley. John was the toughest kid in my middle school by the time we were in fifth or sixth grade. He was also the best looking and most popular. I was a new kid, one of the smallest in the whole school, in fact, and back then getting your ass kicked as a result of that reality was the norm. Anti-bullying consisted of fighting or continuing to get your ass kicked every week. I also had a terrible, knee-buckling fear of heights. John did not. I finally asked him one day how he did it, climbing buildings and doing all of the things I could not. I asked him about it.
“I wish I wasn’t afraid of stuff, like you. How do you do it?”
“What? It’s not that I’m not afraid of stuff. I mean, I’m not afraid of heights like you, but I know I can fall, just like you do. I’m not stupid. I just don’t let fear be the reason I do or don’t do something. That’s it.”
I’ve never forgotten that conversation and most of my life has been a conscious attempt to live up to the simple and profound truth. It’s not that we all don’t have fear, it’s an important adaptive evolutionary mechanism. You should be afraid of an alligator; if not, your genes would soon be eliminated from the gene pool. BUT, sometimes circumstances require us to face fears and the options then are either to freeze and be another predator’s lunch or to bow up and do what must be done. Learning to conquer fear in controlled scenarios, be it confronting the fear of public speaking by being compelled to give a speech in class, of striking out in baseball in front of one’s family and friends, or of making a mistake in a violin solo, are all hugely important events that have almost nothing to do with the outcome: what is important is the facing of fear. It is a skill that can be learned.
To return to my thoughts on self-sufficiency, being stranded in an unusual scenario is only crippling if one allows fear to override judgment and good sense, if one is ill-equipped to adapt mentally and physically to the challenge of it. But this modern trend of outsourcing our independence by giving away our desire and ability to protect ourselves is more than silly, it is deadly.
No active shooter scenario, no matter where it occurs, has ever been stopped by the police. At best, it has been mitigated. Almost universally speaking, by the time they show up, it’s already over. Child victims are certainly blameless, and I’m not going to fault shooting victims for not reacting. In fact, I don’t carry my gun with me at all times and so there but for the grace of God (or “flying spaghetti monster” as my atheist friends like to make me say when teasing me) go I. But why don’t I always carry my gun? Because my government has transformed me into a criminal by doing so, simply by trying to engage in the inherent right of self-defense.
At the start of this Nation, the attempt to disarm the populace was a sufficient provocation to cause 20,000 people to gather and march on Boston against the greatest army in the world – including 16 year olds (as noted above). Now we shuffle meekly through lines like sheep, disrobing in front of our neighbors under the watchful eye of corpulent bureaucrats (who, it should be noted, are unarmed themselves), who then grope our women openly, force mothers to remove infants from their car seats, require the aged and infirm to get out of their wheelchairs, all in the name of what? Security? Because what – some fundamentalist nutjob might try to blow up a plane?
We have become a nation of pants-shitting cowards. Until and unless we make the individual and collective decision to take care of ourselves, we are doomed. We can jump and down and snivel about the failures of the CIA, the FBI, the police, etc. and vote them even more power over us, or we can start to bear the fuck down and act like independent human beings, sovereign entities unto ourselves, responsible for our own well-being and able to help those around us. OR, we can continue to be cowards, crying about why we haven’t been protected, and demanding more security while giving away the last of our freedom and liberty to underwhelming bureaucrats who herd us like cattle.
If I were King-for-a-Day, I would make high school end a year earlier, and as part of the curriculum, ALL students would be required to meet minimum physical requirements, including spending a few weeks each summer out in nature, learning how to build a basic shelter from the elements, how to make a fire, boil water, make a snare and a trap, make field expedient fishing line from common items, what to carry in a personal safety kit and keep it in a car, how to scale a fish, or dress out small game, cook it, and otherwise survive for short periods of time in both the woods, mountains, and the desert.
Seems absurd? I don’t think so. And I can’t imagine that anyone who’s given the matter much thought would disagree. There is a confidence, a calmness, and a sense of peace that comes from being capable of taking care of one’s self that nothing else can possibly provide.
I suspect the group that would most disagree is our government, too. I get the distinct feeling they’re not anxious to see a generation of independent Americans, like the ones who founded this country and stood tall against the world’s foremost military. But maybe I’m just being cynical.