The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Thank you for your hugs, virtual chocolate and support. They mean so much. If you'd like to link to the post, that's fine. I don't mind.

I would like to point one thing out: everything that happened to me was entirely legal. The TSA fines people, not the other way around. They are allowed to do everything they did, and do it without reason; they don't have to give a reason for anything but arresting you, and I was not under arrest. The thing is, both my fiancee and I accept this as a risk and a price of modern air travel in this country (I am not saying we agree with it, or condone it, or whatever. Just that we were both wide-eyed aware of the legal ratlines available for TSA agents to scurry along, and stepped into the airport anyway). I am not even so much protesting the search and the questioning, both of which are publicly stated risks of airline travel, especially in major cities.

I am objecting to the manner and the spirit in which it was all carried out. If your job requires you to search my person, speak calmly and plainly to me, and allow me to maintain until the last possible minute my trappings of spiritual security. There is no need to indulge in psychological terror when your subject is a weeping woman who did nothing to provoke a search, other than book a one-way ticket, and stand sniffling and clinging to her fiancee. I am objecting to the flavour of mockery, sexism and homophobia which the experience carried, and to the behaviour of people whose uniform gives them near-uncheckable power over... people just like them.

Maybe it has to be. It didn't have to be the way it was. That's all.

Special hugs to muffinbutt , la_rainette , copperbadge  and mortifyd , for keeping darthrami  and me sane. Well, for all the given allowance of sane we ever are.

And darthrami  is my storm shelter, my beloved and my beautiful. She talks to my boss for me when I'm hoarse from crying and deaf as a stump from flying home in a wee baby jet plane. My boss.