Feel safe yet?

Airports in America these days are absolute nightmares for the average traveler to navigate. Rules for what one is allowed to bring through security seem to change by the hour, surly TSA workers bark at you if you dare to take one step in the wrong direction or say or do anything but bow and scrape and tug at one's forelock at every screamed command (this has happened to me repeatedly), the airport police seem to allow one to stop for .6 second to pick up one's Aunt Gladys in the arrival lane (remember this one, it'll figure in quite importantly in a second), and "tactical operators" roam the concourse with attack dogs and fully automatic M4 rifles, looking for a terrorist to open up on (I personally saw this at the Baltimore airport). All of this "security" is done for you, of course, in an attempt to make you feel "safe".

So, with all of this policing and watching and surveilling going on, how does this happen?

Kenneth Davis, a 72-year-old minister from Wichita, arrived on a plane at the Orlando airport. He wasn't feeling well, so he asked for a wheelchair. A skycap took him in the chair to a bench outside the front of the airport. While sitting on the bench, the minister apparently suffered a stroke, and there he sat......

...FOR THREE DAYS.

He was only noticed and taken to a hospital after his family filed a missing-persons report...

...FROM WICHITA.

Poor Mr. Davis was still sitting on the bench, dehydrated and covered in his own waste. He is now in a Florida hospital, and is expected to recover.

What kind of brain-dead "security" doesn't notice a man sitting basically motionless on a bench outside of an airport for 72 hours straight, especially at three and four in the morning when no one else is around? You'd think that one of the cops would pick up on the fact that Mr. Davis had taken up residence at the airport, but that seems to not be the case.

Kip Hawley, the head of the TSA, sure had it right when he called certain aspects of airport security, such as confiscating people's lighters while allowing them to keep matches, "security theater". Of course, there is much irony in that, since Hawley was the one who came up with the failed policy in the first place, and the term was originally coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the chaos and futility of the TSA trying to enforce the inane policies mandated by the bureaucrats.

I would venture to claim that if an airport police force drops the ball this badly, they can also rightly be accused of "security theater".