Flying is no Longer a Pleasure

When I was young, my mother and father divorced, and shortly thereafter my mother and all her children moved back to California while my father stayed in Massachusetts. This resulted in my brother and I flying back and forth several times a year. I loved it. If you've never been an unaccompanied minor flying in the '80's, I strongly recommend it. Probably due to a desire to avoid crying children on a 6+ hour flight, we were treated like kings -- free cards, free pins, free headphones (back when you had to buy those), meeting the pilot, etc. Not too surprisingly, I reveled in flying as a result, and it's a feeling that has always stayed with me. There were always lots of little benefits that I liked of course, as a vegetarian and later a vegan, for example, I always got my food before anyone else. But more fundamentally, the feeling of lifting off into the air was such an amazing, miraculous freedom that any inconveniences (like security trying to pull the head off my teddy bear when I was young) were overlooked as the engine drove me into the sky. I always criticized people for complaining about it, and thought they were being mean when they said that the lines were inconvenient or some similar gripe.

However, I can say that the last few times I've flown, particularly the most recent, have stolen that joy from me, to the point where I want to avoid flying whenever possible in the future. The security kabuki, as it's been described, in the years after 2001 has always been ridiculous to me, but it seems that in recent years and even months it's gotten much worse. The body scanner is a joke, albeit a joke which pumps radiation into our bodies, and the people who work as TSA agents are the worst kind of fluffed-up petty tyrants who push everyone around with what small amount of power they have. Never mind that trains are far more vulnerable. And ports. And boats under the Golden Gate bridge. And trucks full of fertilizer parked anywhere. And flights from small unsecured airports get you to not go past security in larger ones. And employees sneaking in weapons. And and and.

So what is really going on here, if it's not to actually make things safer? I would have said, when it was merely annoying, that it was (as described earlier) a mime show to convince us that the government was Doing Something to make us safer, so we didn't need to worry and criticize. But as it's been ramped up to this higher level, at a time when people are actually less concerned with security than they were before, I've come to the realization that it is much worse. We are required, in order to do something which is unavoidable for so many people to get to work or seeing their family or indeed vacation, to submit ourselves to a police state. Armed guards parade around (not only police, though they are their as well, but some special group of people who are able to carry weapons despite virtually no background checks or formal training -- thugs, in other words); we are required to carry ID with us at all times which must be produced on demand; all of our possessions are subject to immediate search with no probable cause; our bodies are subject to invasive scan, either with inappropriate touching (of very young children as well) or by potentially dangerous levels of x-rays which allow people to see us naked; roped off free-speech zones which are carefully managed; etc.

Take away "at an airport," and this is immediately recognizable as a totalitarian nightmare from a science fiction dystopia. By participating in this performance (as with any other social performance, from gender to race to job title), we internalize the role we play into our sense and definition of our self, and it becomes easier to perform this role in the future -- indeed, it becomes harder to not slip into this role (and remember: in this performance if we don't act correctly we can miss our flight, go to jail, be denied the right to ever fly again, or worse.)

As John Dewey said, if you can control the songs of a country, you don't have to worry about its laws. It's ridiculous for a country where "fake it until you make it" is a near-mantra religiously repeated and believed, to deny that acting like submissive members of a dominating, hierarchical state might change the way we see ourselves and our nation. So for me, flying is no longer anything to be looked forward to, but something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Placing myself in chains that heavy cannot be made up for by flying away.