It’s not likely a record of any sort, but it’s also not the most common thing to have three airport pickups in three days.  Yesterday, my son and I flew in from beautiful Milwaukee. Today, my daughter flies in from college.  Tomorrow, my parents fly in from God’s Waiting Room.

I called my mother yesterday, to check in and make sure all was well. She asked me a question she’s never asked me before: How was the airport?  I told her it was adequate; in need of new carpet and a more thoughtful color scheme, but otherwise fine.  “No, I mean with the TSA.”

When news that the United States led the world in incarceration of its own was released, she didn’t ask me how the prisons were.  Videos are popping up everywhere showing ordinary people in humiliating, offensive situations.  There hasn’t been a news broadcast in days that hasn’t included a piece about the TSA.  When the elderly start worrying about it, the issue has become organic. 

People care because people fear it touches their lives.  That’s the only time people care.

My lost post of yesterday was supposed to be about law and order advocate Kurt Scheidegger’s  Crime & Consequences post, conceding that this is all theatrics (and hence a sham, by definition) that could be easily ended if we only gave in to the need to profile.  Is this really a wedge being driven between the public and the Constitution to compel us to loosen what little grip remains?  It worked with the USA Patriot Act, and could work again.

The LA Times, apologist for Hope, tell us to  suck it up as the price for peace of mind.  They stand behind our President,  who understands our “frustration” but does what he must.  Obama’s advisors are frustrated as well.

Firm pat-downs and new X-ray machines are part of President Obama’s effort to redouble airline security after last Christmas’s attempted bombing aboard an airplane landing in Detroit. That incident exposed Obama to scathing criticism from Republicans who said he did not grasp the terrorist threat facing the nation.

Now, the administration is under attack from the opposite direction, as some travelers complain that the latest measures go too far. That – and polls showing broad public support for the X-ray machines – has left some White House advisers feeling “frustrated,” as one put it, by media coverage focused heavily on the treatment of passengers, rather than the dangers the measures are designed to prevent.

The apologists’ answer, if you don’t like it, don’t fly, is the response Americans will never accept.  Convenience is our birthright.  Try prying that our of our cold, dead fingers.

What has developed is a fundamental rift between ordinary people and the mechanics of government.  The people are not against safety or peace of mind.  They have long believed, however, that prodding fingers were the province of bad guys.  They aren’t bad guys.  It’s all too ridiculous to them, watching children and pregnant women and old men with hip replacements treated like potential terrorists.  But because people fly, they believe it could happen to them.  That’s why this has gone too far.  It touches them.

The question today is what tomorrow’s protest, National Opt-Out Day, will bring.  My initial guess is that it will bring little, if anything.  Only a handful of hardcore people will engage in protest, most wanting nothing more than to get where they’re going as quickly and with the least amount of personal humiliation as possible.   People may applaud those bold enough to stand up for rights, but they have no plans on putting themselves in anyone’s crosshairs when they have dinner plans.

The bigger question is whether this is a bad thing.  The idea of the protest is to disrupt air travel.  While more radicalized people will applaud action in the face of the TSA’s excesses, most will not.  Make regular folks miss their plane and their anger will immediately shift from the TSA to the protesters.  Make them stand in a line for a prolonged period of time, their legs hurting, feet aching, and they will seethe.  This too touches them, with greater immediacy than the potential of being oogled by some unseen TSA agents.

The TSA has been doing an amazing job of vilifying itself without our help.  It has generated an groundswell of opposition from the most unlikely sources, and has grown organically.  You can’t buy organic growth.  You can’t cobble it together with all the protests in the world.  It happens only when it happens, and it’s happening.  Like interrupting a judge when he’s reaming out your adversary, the surest way to kill a good thing is to divert attention away from the root cause of the problem to a new problem.

In the scheme of indignities heaped on people, this barely registers.  These posts are filled with stories of bad government actors, yet do little to alter anyone’s concerns.  Reading about bad things happening to people isn’t the same as being touched by bad things. 

Over the next two days, millions of people will pass through the Transportation Security Administration’s screening lines.  People will be angry and frustrated no matter what happens.  The blue shirts will get testy and annoyed, eventually flexing their power no matter how well they’ve been instructed to turn that frown upside down.  

Left to their own devices, the TSA will wreak havoc on ordinary people.  That’s the only way people come to realize anything.  Don’t divert attention away from the governmental excesses and give them something else to blame.  Let the TSA touch them.  Only then will people care.