terradevil,

Your faith in the goodness of your fellow man is admirable. Unfortunately, it's misplaced. Many -- not all! -- of these "security" screeners are engaging in class warfare, plain and simple.

Many of the screeners resent the generally more successful population of air travelers that they encounter every day and demonstrate their resentment in the ways that so many of us have described. Confiscating nail clippers from successful business-people is great fun if you are a minimum-wage, uneducated, unskilled person who never gets to fly because you are too poor. It's even more fun if the business-people object! Then you get to show them who's boss.

Anyone who believes that these people are "just trying to do their jobs" is dreaming. There's a lot more than that going on.

Bruce