Monday, July 26, 2010

State-Sanctioned Classism, at an Airport Security Screening Near You

by Joshua Holland July 26, 2010
I was in Las Vegas for Netroots over the weekend, and although I’d seen these express security lines that the Department of Homeland Security offers well-heeled business- and first-class travelers in the past, it had never occurred to me just how outrageous that is, on principle, in a supposedly equal society.
DHS is a government agency, financed by our tax dollars. We all pay about the same overall tax rate, more or less. By what right do people who can afford to pay a private airline a bundle of cash for a cushy seat get to cut in front of me?
Flying has become a tremendously annoying thing to do since 9/11, and if hard-working, tax-paying Americans flying tourist class have to wait in that long, slow line — maintained by the government — why don’t the wealthy? The airlines can pamper them all they want — they paid for it, and that’s how the private sector  works — but what did they do to deserve that courtesy from the feds? What the Hell is this, an aristocracy?
It’s really annoying but, again, it’d never occurred to me before because we are constantly told, virtually from birth, that we live in a classless society, where the state doesn’t favor the wealthy. I know that’s not true, as do most folks reading this post, but the meritocracy narrative is so dominant that you can walk by an express security line that your government has set up exclusively for the convenience of the well-to-do and not give it a second thought.
Here’s what you learn in school — Thomas Jefferson’s view of American society (as cited by Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection):
In America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.

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