Fall Samhain Moon
Bon Aire, Ga. Up early yesterday to make the US Airways flights from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Unremarkable except for a TSA officer in the jetway in Charlotte while loading for the Atlanta flight. Travel brings out an ornery side of me, well, air travel. So, when I got to the TSA officer I said (something it would be better to have said in my head), “Just another way to make travel annoying?” He said, “Another layer of security. And I’m doing it for free.” Me, (again something better kept in my head), “I don’t care.”
Might not have been so vocal but I’ve been reading Dave Eggers new book, The Circle. This is a thinly disguised critique of Google and online culture. In particular it attacks the insistent need for transparency, for personal knowledge spread out over the web and instantly available for all. It cranked up my already strong sense of personal privacy, created in part by my introverted nature but also by my political stance far to the left of the norm. I’d also had my first taste of Foucault in the last week which, like the Eggers, lays bare the unintended consequences of otherwise well meaning systems.
In the instance of airport security for example I realized we have been trained for submission as we line up passively, wait for someone to check our tickets and i.d. We then take off clothing, even our belts, allow our bodies to be probed by x-ray and agree to be judged by ill trained, low paid TSA personnel.
This is, ironically, an antidote for the toxin of terrorism. Those who would take our liberty have, through the judo of fear, managed to convince us to take our liberty away through our on own efforts. Security, in exactly the degree to which we apply it, reduces our freedom and reinforces fear.
Training for submission is the opposite of democracy, yet it seems to appear everywhere these days. The NSA debate now swirling has a large component of I don’t care if they watch. Well, I care. I care because they care to sweep my data up. Like the TSA the expectation is that we will embrace this is training in submission to those who know better than we do. Well, I don’t think they know better and I’m not willing to share my data unasked and with no safeguards other than “Trust us.”
Anyhow.
