Hey you. Yes, you. The one standing in the lineup for your holiday flight to Disney World/Hawaii/New York.
Been waiting long?
That long, eh?
I bet you’re starting to wonder why you didn’t just stay home and spend your vacation money on that 66-inch HDTV that costs the same as a vacation in Florida. You could watch Disney movies and go to the bathroom anytime you like.
You can thank Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the “Arabian Peninsular” branch of al-Qaida for the wait. Umar, in case you haven’t heard, is the now infamous crotch bomber, eclipsing the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, for Annoying Terrorist of the Decade. Clever Umar, he got in just under the wire.
He tried to blow up his underwear, but was stopped by some quick-thinking passengers who, unlike airport security, recognize a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire when they see one.
As it is, we’re lucky. If Osama bin Laden wasn’t so cheap he’d send his terrorists first class or business class. They would all be whisked through check-in security lineups, enjoy priority baggage handling and offered free booze on the way to “paradise.”
The U.S. Transport Security Administration, embarrassed by its failure to stop a suspected terrorist from boarding a plane to Detroit, has decided to take it out on Canadians (and just about every other flyer in the world — heads of state and their families are exempt‚ for now), imposing a draconian regime that makes even boarding a Greyhound to Winnipeg seem more attractive.
The TSA has decided that preventing you from going to the bathroom in the last hour of your flight, no matter how badly you have to go, is an effective deterrent to terror. Just sit there in your own puddle and stop whining.
Meanwhile, al-Qaida has figured out that you don’t actually have to blow up the plane to win the war. You just have to try to blow up your shorts and western civilization collapses anyway.
It doesn’t really matter that, according to the website Gizmodo, the chance of being the victim of a terrorist attack is one in 10,408,947, or one attack every 11.5 billion miles, or one attack every 3,105 years.
Compare: The chance of getting hit by lightning is only one in 500,000. According to those odds, the TSA should shut down all flights if lightning is forecast. Better yet, get under your bed and stay there until the threat is over.
And no going to the bathroom!
