PHIPPSBURG – After reading the argument promulgated by a Maine Voices columnist regarding the new Transportation Security Agency policy of subjecting citizens to digitized body searches or pat-downs (“Sheep don’t make good capitalists,” Dec. 28), and after becoming somewhat aggravated by the nature of some of his comments, I thought it only equitable to attempt to provide a counterargument to the megaphone of the modern press.
The author of the column, USM professor Michael Hamilton, compares the new TSA policy to the totalitarian mechanisms employed by such communists and fascists as Stalin and Hitler.
This, I believe, is an analogy predicated on false grounds and one which does not take into account all the details and facts of the former and latter situations.
While there is an apparent similarity between the lines of people awaiting detection techniques at today’s modern airports and the lines of people awaiting checkpoints — a tactic, incidentally, employed by the Israelis — in totalitarian societies, any deeper investigation and analysis of the facts will reveal a stark dichotomy separated by a conceptual canyon as large as the one that can be found in Arizona.
The Nazis consigned human beings to checkpoints in order to verify their ethnicity and to filter out those they deemed “not part of the supreme race.”
Nazi checkpoints were designed to facilitate the ends of a warped and hellacious ideology. Contrarily, and regardless of any viewpoint to the contrary, the TSA is acting in good faith and in the public interest: Its detection methods, and the consequential lines that attend them, have no ideological motivation but are instead enacted as a last line of defense in order to protect innocent travelers from the misguided wrath of a terrorist.
Comparing the new TSA policy to the police states of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is like comparing an oak tree to a pine tree simply because they both possess the appearance of a green coloration. It is a judgment that I doubt any naturalist would accept.
The author goes on to conclude that the mere act of submitting to waiting in a line and undergoing the “humiliation” of a body scan will transform this country into a nation of sheep, unwilling to take risks and therefore unable to become vital components in the capitalistic system.
This argument, first of all, does not take into account the fact that travelers have submitted to waiting in lines at airport checkpoints for quite some time, and that this submission, as far as I can tell, has so far not corrupted the integrity of the American spirit or our willingness to take risks.
A counter moral argument can likewise be proposed that if we are willing to get up in arms about this minimal invasion of privacy, it only demonstrates our selfish inability to sacrifice for the good of the whole.
That would, according to the line of reasoning employed in the former argument, necessarily engender the fear that America is in danger of becoming a nation of unreasonable and spoiled children, unable to exert the necessary effort in order to keep the wheels of capitalism in motion.
In reality, this small evolution of policy lacks the power to have the far-reaching effects proposed by the author and, likewise, is not a betrayal of the principles of the Constitution or of the American Spirit.
The events of 9/11 demonstrated the lethal efficacy of a civilian passenger plane. Airport screening procedures are the last line of defense in a layered and complex strategy involving police work, intelligence gathering, diplomacy, military engagement and civic responsibility.
I think it is important to keep in mind that these techniques are not designed merely to protect the individual traveler, but to protect the person that is flying next to him or her, as well as the person who is unsheepishly engaging in the practice of capitalism in their corner office.
While criticism of the government is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy, it is also importlant to be fair.
The fact is that nongovernmental terrorist organizations have declared war on the United States, and while this war is not about territorial or economic gain or control, and therefore not necessarily a war in the conventional sense, it is a new evolution of the phenomenon and the concept.
Instead of physical battlements and geographical lines of defense, we are at war with a ghost capable of moving within our borders and inhabiting and deploying the fruits of our own civilization against us.
The modern battlements and lines of defense must therefore, at least in part, be located within our country. Until we can uproot this new poisonous tree, we must strike out its fruit wherever it may fall.
– Special to the Press Herald
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