A thought about taking my son to the airport

I took my 32 year old son to IAH so he could head back to SEA after a brief visit. He has just left the Navy and was on job interviews and it was great to see him. He seemed a bit tense as we drove down Will Clayton Parkway and I asked if he was OK.

He responded, "I joined the Navy, spent 4 years at the Naval Academy and 5 years on an Ohio Class Sub as an officer overseeing the engine room and a huge nuclear weapons arsenal with 24 Trident ICBMs and I protected our nation, yet I feel like I am being treated like a common criminal by the TSA just to get on a plane.!"

I tried to reassure him, reminded him to watch the screening area for any lines that were not using body scanners and just concentrate on getting home to his wife and baby and his new job that he just got. I hugged him as I dropped him off and wondered when he got so grown up and how the years went by so quickly! ^

Please thank your son for his service.

Worse, the TSA clerks think their job is more important to the nation's security because their laughable management tell them they are "so special" every day and they get tin badges. Your son KNEW he was important, but they play act it. Sad.

Thank your son for his service & this is a sad state of affairs. I love to fly but dread it because of what you said in your post. Likewise I'm very tense until I clear the check point.

Sad, isn't it? My husband is also a military officer and made pretty much the same comment last week while we were traveling. The trust the military and government put in him is completely ignored by the TSA (who yes, act as if they play a more important role).

Debatable

A lot of TSA workers are young adults. Plent of them young enough to ba my child and/or grandchild.

If me kids would treat and/or talk to people they. They would be in deep trouble with me.

I taught them respect. And that is a word a lot of TSA dont know what it is.

Bet their parents are really proud of them.

A bubblehead officer with five years on a boomer was tense because some GS-nothing was going to check his ID? Really???

When people have had background checks that allowed them to access to nuclear weapons, they tend to get a little annoyed that some GS-nothing has pegged them as a terrorist just because they have the audacity to <gasp> fly somewhere commercially.

Tense does not necessarily imply fear or worry. Could be (barely) suppressed anger. That's how I feel when there's blueshirts in my immediate future.

I'm not sure it's that the GS-nothing has them pegged as a terrorist so much as the GS-nothings treat everyone passing through the checkpoint with universal contempt.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the person is fresh out of a five-year stint in the Navy, or is a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a wheelchair, or is a geriatric grandmother with an incontinence issue, or a business traveler with two laptops.

It may just be that they resent being stuck in a dead-end job doing theatrical make-work to help the sheeple feel safer, it may be that they really just have a deep contempt for people in general. Who knows? What's generally known is that TSA employees don't care who travelers might be - they hate them all.

Military background, high security or now, he is correct. The thought behind the TSA is that we are guilty until proven innocent. That is a violation of something I think, I don't have the same knowledge as the Teminally Stupid Authority

Additionally...

- Low level bureaucrats check the ID of military personnel on a daily basis to gain access to military bases, utilize things like the base exchange and buy gas for their car. Does he get tense when someone asks for his ID then? Maybe so, but odds are high that he shows ID to a Rent-A-Cop every morning just to get through a gate. Want that bag of chips at the Exchange? Not until you show your ID to that 90 lb Filipina running the register. Tense now?
- like them or not, using juvenile names like "Tray Stackers Association" or whatever to refer to the TSA doesn't exactly add intellectual weight to a point.
- People with brown ID cards have little business commenting on the serious subject of security clearances, especially if they don't know the background of their target audience. Or any other time, for that matter. Dependents should stick with dependent issues when discussing things military.

I get anxious going to the airport. It isn't because I'm afraid of the TSA. It is because I'm anticipating conflict.

How many of those other exchanges you attempted to use as examples involve unqualified personnel performing intrusive searches?

Well, he may never have been frisked by a 90 lb Filipina (actually, I have), but the gate searches at military bases are intrusive and, when conducted by the local Rent-A-Cops, are definitely performed by unqualified personnel. Since I've never been intrusively searched by a TSA person, I cannot comment on their qualifications.

Edit: Come to think of it...my bag was searched at CAE a few years ago. Came up missing a book after that, so maybe intrusive is a good word there.