Life During an Orange Alert….

I have never been more paranoid about travelling in my life. And no, not because I'm afraid of terrorism (puh-lease). No, my paranoia came from the feeling that if I did anything like leave my backpack more than a few inches away from me for just a couple of seconds, I'd have the Terrorism SWAT Team come swooping down on me and I'd be in Guantanomo before you can say "John Ashcroft sucks."

It's not just that when I flew into Dulles, there were more security guards than passengers at 7 in the morning. Or the fact I had to show my ID three times before I even got onto the plane. Or the fact that flying into DC, the Flight Attendant walked down the aisle to make sure she could see everyone's shoes. Or that in order to go through Security this morning, they made all the women who were wearing flip-floppy type shoes take off their shoes. Or the announcements over the PA every five minutes about being on guard for unattended luggage. It was, well, all of that. Throw in the anti-aircraft guns piled up outside D.C. and the barricades set up in front of the Baltimore Amtrak Station (yeah, like that'll be a Terrorist target) and you really get the feeling we're one scared-ass, loced-out, freaked out country right now. All this paranoia is making me paranoid.

At least I didn't get pulled aside and had my luggage searched like I did last year. Nope, being white has it's privileges 'cause it looks like they've dropped any pretense of being Politically Correct and are now only searching people's luggage if they even look remotely Arab, Indian, or just plain swarthy. Of course, it could have been a coincidence that when I walked through the terminal at Oakland Airport and passed by the Security station, the only people who had been yanked out of line and had their luggage searched were kind of Arab/Indian/swarthy looking, but I doubt it. And then this morning, when I went stumbling into another security area, I noticed that some Arab-looking guy had been pulled completely out of line and was being completely scanned by that wand thingy by at least three Security Guards, one of whom looked like he was an inch or two away from ordering a complete cavity search. All this while everyone else was walking around without getting wanded.

You know, racial profiling is fine in theory, but not necessarily fine when you see everyone in the airport who looks Arab-like is off in some corner of the airport being gone over by everyone but the bomb sniffing dogs.