Democracy brings out the majority on any major issue. But there are a lot of minorities too. I'd say every American holds some kind of minority view. I don't hold other countries governments against the people of those countries because people are individuals. I would appreciate it if other peoples did the same for me and my country.
Hell my state government doesn't even represent me. There's 700,000 people in this state, I am one hell of a minority. But I still count.
What is your point Makare?
What I said was that I have never felt that my decency was violated in any other country I have traveled to. That the airport for many people is the first place that they see when they enter a country and the last place they see when they leave. It is the first impression for many people who are coming to your country.
And that first impression is vary bad.[/QUOTE]
Can we put this into perspective?
We can dwell on all the terrible stories about flying that are out there, but honestly:
Between 1.5 and 2 MILLION people fly inside, into, and out of the united states PER DAY.
Two million people on 7,000+ flights each day.
If this was even an occasional experience, we'd be seeing millions of people a year having such horrible problems.
As it is there are "many" really horrible experiences, such as those described in this thread, there are countless bad experiences, there are a lot of poor experiences, and for most people it is, at worst, an inconvenience.
Now I don't want to lessen the terrible, humiliating experience these individuals had, and they should pursue their cases against the TSA, the airlines, and whoever else they deem necessary to come to terms with their experience and to resolve the problems so that they do not occur to others.
But the reality is that most people have the same experience I have: you get into line, you take you shoes, belt, empty your pockets onto the buckets, put your laptop in the buckets, walk through the metal detectors, and then you put everything back on and away and get on your flight.
There are 2 million people doing this every day. The vast majority have little to no problems, and the worst part is waiting in that long line. Heaven forbid you have bored children, or an emo teen that thinks it's funny to joke about bombs, but really.
It may be more inconvenient that other countries. Sorry. We had some guys with box cutters throw us a punch that we still haven't recovered from. You are a victim of our paranoia.
But to pretend that every single passenger, foreign or not, has this 10 minute grope session ordeal is ludicrous at best.
No, the system isn't perfect. Yes, we've recently had some bad scares (the printer cartridge bombs recently found through intelligence efforts that were not caught by our scanners and personnel, and the recent German intelligence information) so we're being a bit more cautious.
Unfortunately the worst part about all this is that these organizations are made up of people, and people make mistakes. These need to be corrected, and where needed people need to be reprimanded, moved into positions where they don't come into contact with passengers, or fired.
It's silly to extrapolate the worst experiences and assume they happen to everyone.
