Travel Trauma
I guess I niftily sidestepped it on my trip to Ashland last week, but there was all kinds of chaos at SeaTac Airport when traffic volumes spiked for normal summer travel, and it became apparent that the TSA had cut back on security screeners. Lines of travelers snaked throughout the terminal and out into the parking garage while about 1/4 of the screening stations remained unmanned. The situation was exacerbated one day when an underground train to an outlying satellite stopped running, and its passengers had to be routed through the security checkpoints for another concourse.
A cynic might suspect that the TSA cutback was, like the FERC drama in California, revenge by the administration against a state that resolutely dumped Republicans. But that kind of cynicism and paranoia has no place in THIS blog.
It also came to light that the crowd of travelers was swelled by busloads dumped at the airport by cruise ship operators. My distaste for this industry was explicated below , and now I have more ammunition. The Port wants to spend over a billion dollars to build a third runway at SeaTac, and now I begin to suspect that it’s not to make travel easier for us residents, it’s to abet the Port’s sister business, accommodating cruise ship operations. But that kind of cynicism and paranoia has no place in THIS blog.
In a related event yesterday, someone was inexplicably allowed to board an Alaska airlines plane with a 4-inch knife and a bag full of fireworks. He boarded in Missoula, not Seattle, but it makes ya wonder why we have to endure more and more onerous security procedures (we’re now REQUIRED to remove shoes before going through screening, for instance) if something so egregious can happen. I’m thinking maybe we ought to just dump the whole system, do some random strip searches of the more attractive passengers, and take our chances with the rest!
