If you don't have a driver's license or a photo ID card with you, that doesn't matter; no one will request to see one.  If you are carrying a loaded gun in your pocket or underneath your jacket, no one will know. In fact, if you do have a valid ticket, there will be nothing to prevent you from boarding a flight while armed to the teeth with concealed weaponry.  The atmosphere at the airport is as free-and-easy as in a public park. The official assumption is that the people around you pose no threat; from the moment you walk through the front doors of the airport until the moment you step onto the plane, not a soul will stop you or ask you a question.  Would you feel safe? Would you want to live in such a country?  You did, if you were a citizen of the United States before the 1970s.  And, in retrospect, the surprising thing is not that airport security measures have become so intrusive and dehumanizing. The surprising thing is that, for all the years of American commercial aviation prior to the '70s, an implicit trust prevailed. For all those years, the strangers around you in an airport or on an airplane were presumed to bear no ill will toward their fellow passengers, to represent no potential danger.  It was a series of hijackings that put the checkpoints and the first rudimentary metal detectors in U.S. airports; they have been there for so long now that it seems like a gauzy illusion to recall the time when travel was predicated on good faith. Ever since September 11, 2001, airline security has escalated with each new terror attempt. No one has had to ask why.  The Transportation Security Administration seems to have been caught off guard by the genuine anger on the part of passengers in recent days. Americans have acquiesced for so long to just about anything the government has asked them to accept in the name of national security that the TSA may have thought that of course, if safety was at stake, the public would always willingly go along.
As you are standing in an airport security line this Thanksgiving week, waiting to be funneled into one of the invasive new body-imaging machines, or, if you decline that, to be pulled aside and