This is a marvelous and deeply insightful post. I hope that everyone here reads it at least two or three times.

The only way to get people to take low-paying, crummy jobs like TSA screener is to artificially glorify them by changing the title to "officer" and telling the people doing those low-paid, crummy jobs that they are providing a vital service, protecting the country, blah, blah, blah. It's all nonsense, of course, but the people in those jobs are generally unsophisticated and buy into the hype. The ones who catch on eventually leave.

Note for the record that real law-enforcement officers like FAMs are several notches above the typical screener and actually are well-trained. It's not their fault that there are essentially no terrorists on planes -- or the probability is so low as to be indistinguishable from zero.

Bruce