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I was sitting in the Seattle airport waiting for my plane, minding my own business, reading a book. A pair of overdressed homeland security agents with some sort of cart, weapons, and a mission interrupted me and demanded my papers, my bags, and my body for their pleasure.
In another america, the one I grew up in as a child of the 60s, the one before Mr. Bush came to town, I would have simply told the overdressed overarmed idiots to mind their own business as I was minding mine. Not in Mr. Bush's america. To have asserted my constitutional right to privacy, to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure, to travel and go about my business unhindered by the state, would have meant arrest and detention, further and more elaborate indignities, and more abuse of my rights. Rights that are now only theoretically inalienable, for as far as I can tell we have all been pretty well and quite effectively alienated from those rights so clearly declared as never to be denied in the Declaration authored by Mr. Jefferson.
I allowed the uniformed idiots to do their job, to go about humiliating people for no reason, to search my body and my possessions for the probable cause of waiting for a plane. At the empty your pickets phase, some change fell to the floor, upsetting the natural order of searcher and searchee. The authorities demand that the suspect must put all possessions into their control. The change on the floor was in an ambiguous state. It was no longer technically in the possession of the suspect. The agents were unwilling to bend over to pick up the money themselves as that was an act that would quite literally lower their stature in front of others. I was asked to pick it up and responded, quite politely, 'no thanks'. It was a small act of stubbornness on my part. Not even rising to the level of resistance. Just an idiotic response to an idiotic situation. The three of us stood there, more or less at a standstill, they unsure how to complete their task, me considering the effect of unloading more money onto the floor just for shits and giggles. Off script we were and off script we stayed while my detainers ground through the scenario trying to figure out what to do. They gave up. The money remained on the floor unaudited for deadly terrorist devices.
Thank you Mr. Bush for all you have done to transform a republic of free citizens into a police state.
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