I hate flying, and have hated it for years ever since 9/11, and have sworn never to fly again. It’s for my blood pressure. I hate it not only because of the airlines’ treatment of passengers or customers as faceless widgets to be squeezed together as much as possible in an airport, but also on the planes, forcing one to come in physical contact with other passengers, many of whom one would not otherwise wish to touch. I hate it also because of the role of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
The typical large airport is a microcosm of a regulated, controlled society, an experiment in Progressivism. The miasma of the environment is repellent if not dulling to the senses. Modern, post-9/11 airports are intended to be soul-destroying because the only way to exercise the government’s power is to hold one’s business and purposes hostage and extort soul-destroying submission to the state’s will. “You have to go there?” says the TSA. “Well, you have to get past me first. Drop your drawers.”
All American airports have been turned into microcosms of totalitarianism. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, once one has passed through – or rather endured – being molested, fondled, spindled, stamped, x-rayed, bar-coded, ordered from here to there, stripped bare to reveal one’s secrets or shames, approved or disapproved, and made to conform to the government’s measure of good and acceptable behavior. The milieu demands total submission to the state’s will and ends. There is certainly no ambience left to an airport, except one of nonstop dread and mental numbness.
Everything seems to be designed and planned to distract one from observing that once one is in the clutches of the government, and also of the airlines, one has been reduced to the status of of an assembly line cog to be processed and dispatched as speedily as possible – speedily in terms of bureaucracy.
I remember the time when flying was somewhat romantic, something to look forward to with some excitement. I remember being greeted by a throng of friends when I stepped off a plane. Today, anyone not flying isn’t even allowed in most of the spaces and byways of an airport. One’s friends, family, and well-wishers have been banned from having any business inside an airport. One’s greeters are confined to an area outside of the processing center.