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On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, Balu Raman wrote:
Once again I want to stress that individual experiences are individual. If
you are of a different color, different national ( pick your nation
here)-looking, even if you are an American, look funny etc. etc. it is very
different, even if you don't carry a screw driver by accident, on board.
I have a friend whose parents immigrated here from India who got
yanked out of line, hauled into a back room, and cavity-searched at gunpoint
*twice*, at two different airports (one of them was Logan), on two different
domestic flights a few months apart in early 2002. He's a polite, clean-cut
young man, an avowed pacifist to the point that he will not defend himself
against attack, and a natural-born citizen of the United States. His only
offense, as near as we can tell, was flying while brown.
And, for bonus fun, try sometime flying as escort to a 90-year-old
woman in the early stages of Parkinson's, who, because her brain chemistry
is no longer working quite right, cannot be made to understand why she is
being required to take off her shoes in the middle of an airport, and can't
deal with non-routine situations with anything but confusion and panic.
That is to say, I don't think that the right reaction to someone
running into oppressive paranoia induced by politically-motivated
fearmongering is to blame that person for not being canny enough to avoid
drawing the oppressor's attention.
- --
John Campbell
[email protected]
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