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Don't Fly During Ramadan
An anonymous reader sends in a harrowing story from Aditya Mukerjee about his recent attempt to fly from New York to Los Angeles. After being pulled aside in the security line, he faced hours of interrogation by uncommunicative officials from several different agencies. When he was finally cleared, his airline, Jet Blue, wouldn't let him on the plane anyway. When he got home, he found evidence that it had been searched. He writes,
"It was 2:20PM by the time I was finally released from custody. My entire body was shaking uncontrollably, as if I were extremely cold, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t identify the emotion I was feeling. Surprisingly, as far as I could tell, I was shaking out of neither fear nor anger - I felt neither of those emotions at the time. The shaking motion was entirely involuntary, and I couldn’t force my limbs to be still, no matter how hard I concentrated. In the end, JetBlue did refund my flight, but they cancelled my entire round-trip ticket. Because I had to rebook on another airline that same day, it ended up costing me about $700 more for the entire trip. .. But no matter how I’ve tried to rationalize this in the last week and a half, nothing can block out the memory of the chilling sensation I felt that first morning, lying on my air mattress, trying to forget the image of large, uniformed men invading the sanctuary of my home in my absence, wondering when they had done it, wondering why they had done it."
OF course I'm proud to be a citizen of the mightiest, richest, most powerful nation in mankind. I'm proud to know that anyone that wants to fuck with us get fucked over 1000 worse and nobody can stop us no matter what.
You might be disappointed and you can get the fuck out. Millions more rich and poor would like nothing better than becoming a US citizen.
God Bless America.
"wondering when they had done it, wondering why they had done it"
Really? You can't quite crack that mystery? Because you were suspicious and too many things added together to make you look like a terrorist. If you think they check someone's house because of race, you're an idiot. There's more to it than that. They take travel history into account, where and how you bought your ticket, your criminal history, your communication history, what type of cell phone you're using, what you're wearing, how many bags you checked. I could go on but hopefully you get it. You set off one too many flags in the system. Deal with it.
There are lots of brands and symbols people identify themselves with. Schools, sports, Apple iThings, politics, religion and lots, lots more. And if you dislike any of these things, you just made an enemy of someone because that is 'their identity.'
It's ridiculous to me... all these "symbol minded people." Perhaps it's my autistic tendencies or something else, but I just can't get behind the things other people get behind. What I see is a bunch of people getting behind a symbol with which they mutually identify and then they all start acting and thinking the same ways.
Whatever the source, most of these things are choices people make. This includes religion. I once had a discussion about religious discrimination with a muslim female who defended her religion and the practices of blending religion and government... and how she thought it was perfectly okay to have religious government.... until, that is, she is not free to do her religious things. She acted as if religion was not a choice. I ended the conversation quickly with "if religion isn't a choice, then it's not faith is it?" She agreed and shut up.