A few months ago, the law enforcement took the jo kata. Today, they took the pocket tool that had a blade, pliers, a file and more. A tool passed along to that had been left by someone else a few months ago and I received yesterday as a gift.
I read how somebody said that one 19 year old, upper-middle class, boy took a trans-atlantic flight, either from Lagos to New York or London to New York, and now billions of people since have to remove our shoes. Yet, the corner cutting habits by corporations go unregulated, unchecked so that we succumb to a precarious economy, unreliable political system, and unsafe public health sector.
I forgot to move the pliers-pocket-tool from my handbag into my checked luggage. When I told the TSA workers that I wouldn’t go back to check it in and that the options for them were to throw it in the garbage or take it, a man replied, “Oh, they don’t allow us to have no fun.”
I believe that.
This economic system and political system has created a new legion of federal, law enforcement employees who choose jobs for the income and health insurance and the future promise of an income in retirement. Hundreds of thousands of workers who have to do body scans of elders, stop-and-frisk of people’s crotches after a red box shows up on a computer screen because the walk-in body scanner could not comprehend some energy or sensation happening with the human specimen moving through it.
These are other tools of domination, separation, and exploitation each time we pass through an airport to board an airplane. In systems created to diminish, disparage and foster distrust so that we desensitize to the surveillance of our bodies and our bags for some false sense of safety, of security.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 