Shoebombers, Dental X-Rays, and 99 Cent Hamburgers

Airports are strange places.

You stand in huge crowds of people, and no one says a word.

A McDonald’s hamburger outside the airport? 99 cents. Inside the airport? $19.25.

Airports are so big now that you often walk further than you end up flying.

Strangely enough, these are not the things that I dislike the most about the airport – that would be security. I don’t like how they look at you like you are a terrorist. I don’t like how they shine that little penlight on your license. I don’t like how the line to go through security, if laid out flat, would stretch from here to Mars.

What I dislike the most is that airport security gives me no feeling of security: they check for metal, check for liquids, make you take off your shoes.  And don’t get me wrong, they do a great job.  But all the things they check for have to do with incidents that have already happened. So while evil people are out there devising new and even more maniacal ways of blowing us up, airport security insists on me taking off my belt and my flip flops.

I would be much more encouraged if airport security made me do something totally inexplicable.

Like cutting one inch of hair off of my head and looking at it under a microscope.

Or making me have a dental x-ray before I can board the plane.

What about forcing me to perform the presidential fitness test from high school?

At least then I would feel like they had an inside scoop on the next terror plot, and not like they were stuck on trying to prevent the boring old repeats.

I know there is a life lesson hiding in here somewhere. It probably has to do with the negatives of living a reactionary life style, instead of deliberately plotting new courses and trying strange, exciting, crazy things. Or maybe it’s just that we should all start taking the bus.