By Tim Robertson
banned from all flights.
Though limiting items through which an attack can be carried out could probably deter terrorists, it seems that the very freedom we are fighting for is being curbed in the name of its own preservation.
Should the authorities be looking for explosives in some grandmother’s lipstick? Or should they be looking for terrorists? The Transportation Security Administration already utilizes profiling methods to identify potential terrorists, such as analyzing body language. Perhaps it is time to enhance such profiles to focus on age, gender, and ethnicity.
While in an ideal world, focusing on such arbitrary characteristics would be unnecessary, the common perception is that most terrorist attacks, completed or thwarted, are perpetrated by male Arabs between the ages of 17 and 35.
However, not every man of Middle Eastern decent traveling on a plane has intentions of perpetrating an act of violence. It would seem that diverting more security resources to those who resemble previous perpetrators is at once a brief cessation of civil liberties and good police work besides being a greater violation of civil rights, than the prohibition of carrying on certain items.
Condoning such activity could set a precedent to which our nation should not be susceptible, that of racial profiling. Many people have died to support our most cherished principle, that all are created equal.
More may die in the process of preserving our moral integrity, but the refusal to submit to such judgmental biases is what we are fighting for in the first place. In Iraq, Sunnis are killing Shiites because they are Shiites, and Shiites are killing Sunnis because they are Sunnis.
Our country’s history is packed with evidence of such ignorance, North vs. South, man vs. woman, white vs. black. We have fought and are continuing to fight these battles in order to create the society our forefathers presciently envisioned. We can continue to progress with idealism on our side, but require no compromises to our core values.
If this means that temporarily we will be without luxuries such as bottled water or hair gel, it’s a small price to pay to preserve the dignity of an entire race.
So put your lipstick in your checked baggage and consider yourself lucky that you live in a country where you’re free to travel, to speak, to drive, to practice a religion of your choice and, thanks to the perseverance of our ideals, to dream that it can only get better.
Tim Robertson is a graduate student in Political Science. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
