Originally Posted by TSAJohn
You think our checkpoints are bad? We had a Serbian woman come through our checkpoint not too long ago and she was in hysterics and crying. Shaking too. We took her to the side and after she calmed down a little, she said that it wasn't us she was afraid of. She was just having flashbacks of the horrors of other checkpoints she had been through in her life.
I'm glad that you treated her with kindness and dignity. I'll admit to, once, after getting my tenth consecutive SSSS, breaking down into tears at a checkpoint. The screeners there at BWI's selectee lane took turns laughing at me and yelling at me, calling me a baby and offering to bring me a diaper. There were at least four screeners involved in this incident.
However, the Serbian woman's response begs the question: why did your checkpoint remind her of the ones at which horrors had occurred? What do internal checkpoints have to do with security? Internal checkpoints are great for government control of people's movement, but these internal checkpoints seem to have high failure rates, according to recent reports, at what they are ostensibly supposed to do: find concealed weapons.