Me, Myself, and I: A White Man's Baggage

Venturing through airport security this Spring Break really made me realize just how much junk I carry around.

Like any other compliant and dutiful soon-to-be airplane passenger, I step up to the conveyor belt and remove my sandals. Even though they look like shoes, and feel like shoes,  the Sanuk company vehemently asserts they are sandals, not shoes. But what else could you expect from some liberal, hippy, surfer company whose name means "happiness" in Thai. Nonetheless, I use their pseudo-self-identification as sandals to forgo wearing socks. Which leads to me having to walk across an airport security section barefoot.

You know, I really like being bare-foot, and would be so at most times if their wasn't a threat of stepping on the broken glass of a crack pipe,  or the HIV-positive needle of a used syringe. During the summer I never wear shoes. And when I was a little kid, I'd purposefully walk barefoot through my yard in the bone-chilling death grip of winter over dead grass, hard earth, and painful rocks. I thought it would make me tough. I suppose that marine slogan, "Pain is just weakness leaving the body," (a honest-to-God testament of "military-intelligence"), had a profound affect upon me.

So here I am barefoot behind a business man in his dress-socks and he is fat upon the prosperity of a sanitized life whitewashed like the walls of the airport he travels in three times a month (six if you count back and forth round-trip), as he says to the Haitian TSA agent, complaining about how invariantly slow, crowded, and inefficient airport security screening is. And you know, I can't really blame the stiff. Because it's about four-hundred sunburnt suburbians, bottle-necked into fat, twisting, chaotic lines leading to the conveyor belt. And everyone is elbow to elbow with one another, and their carry-on's and electronic devices and little kids and little pets on leashes bump into one another and they step on each others toes and feet and no one makes small-talk because that is what you do on vacation not when you're returning home and they—no, I mean we—get poked and prodded and shouted out like cattle by the lifeless TSA agents, "no bottles or containers of vessels or chalices of less than 4 fl. oz. or that is 16 imperial ounces or on 324 ml. and laptops need to come out of the bag, but Kindles don't and have a happy trip. And you brown-man with accent, and blonde lady with the nice rack, please step aside for selective screening." And I can't help but laugh to myself. For I think that if some Jihadist was really wanting to kill some white people, he would just bring an explosive device right here into airport screening. I mean, there is four-hundred of us God-fearing Americans in a tightly crowded circle. Hell, its like a frickin' Christmas present for a terrorist. One grenade could do the job. Or perhaps he could just do the same at the Masters. And I turn to my dad and say, "Man, can you believe that shot that Bubba made yesterday?"

And as I undo my snake-skin belt, and unclasp my watch, and remove my glasses, and put them in a bin, and then get another bin in which I put my unzipped laptop bag, I realize that I sort of look like the guys who follow around the golfers at the Masters. With the colorful shorts and collared shirt. And I wonder how I got like this. To be a prep who has to always match—even when he is anonymous, in a mass of four-hundred people who look fat and old and sloppy and way too likely to make it to age 90. And jeez, what about social security? And I want to puke. And I guess it is my ego. My arrogance. My striving for superiority. It is a cancer I guess. An enormous growth. And if I tried to put it in a bin it wouldn't fit. It's head alone couldn't get crammed into an x-ray machine. Even if you knocked it out with chloroform and tied it down with ropes like they did with King Kong. And even that wouldn't work. The drugs and the ropes would just make it real hot—it would climb some building, rape the prettiest woman inside and tear the whole towering building, or perhaps even two of them, down.  And if I could take my cancerous arrogance and radiate it with the emissions of that x-ray machine till it died, I sure as Hell would. Afterall, vanity is what made Satan. And I realize that I must kill my own white-devil before a terrorist does.