What Child Is This?

In a perfect storm of a Christmas story, a grandmother places her one month old grandson in a plastic bin and shoves him into an x-ray security screening device at LAX.  The child was not noticed until he had been in the tunnel for several seconds and a screener saw, presumably, the shape of a tiny human skeleton.  (This story can be read in the LA Times.)

To completely dissect this one would take more strength than I have after making gingerbread boys this morning.   And it's just too depressing for extended consideration.   A few highlights:

• Airport security is a time wasting,  embarrassing, trash-talking joke.  More than three ounces of liquids and you're made to feel like a criminal, but whole babies gliding into the machines, sure, no problem.
• LAX is arguably the most pathetic airport in the country.  How appropriate that baby-nuking premiered here!  All the touchy-feelie murals and politically correct cultural debris sludged around the premises cannot save it from the underlying stupidity, incompetence, graft, carelessness and hysteria.
• What about "my brother's keeper"?   What in the name of heaven could the surrounding passengers have been thinking as they watched the baby go into the bin and into the x-ray? 
• Since no amount of languages could possibly reach every traveler in today's mobile world, WHY don't we have international style block graphics showing the warnings on these machines?

Well.  The baby is okay, the grandmother hopefully will forgive herself, the passengers who looked on and did nothing may reconsider their passive, heedless ways of being around others.   And perhaps this shock will help us institute an Israel-style airport security system.  Certainly our current system is a travesty, annoying almost everyone to the point of homicide while failing to detect dangerous goods and people. 

Two thousand years ago a newborn baby slept in a barn, his parents driven there by the outrages of a greedy, detached ruler and the careless establishment that profited from his policies.  How little has changed:  Today a stranger among us unwittingly sends a tiny baby into dangers created by the proud and foolish, while the not-very-wise look on in slack-jawed  apathy.  If there had been a death, better if it had been someone high in the inept management of the Transportation Security Administration.

God forgive us.  God forgive us, every one.   

Comments

[Val]

Wow! Here I took you seriously when you said you were taking a hiatus from blogging... I surf back by & you've got THREE new posts! Yippee, Xmas comes early 4 me... Merry Christmas to you & yours my dear...
P.S. for some reason Typepad won't accept the URL of my blog:
http://endurovet.blogspot.com/

[ZZMike]

I'm looking for a source that gives the strength of airport x-ray machines. On one hand, I don't think they're all that strong, but on the other, they're on continuously - unlike hospital machines.

There's another contibuting factor - here's a clip from the article:

"Officials, who declined to release the 56-year-old woman's name, said she spoke Spanish and apparently did not understand English."

The simple solution is to put signs on the machines saying "Do not put babies on this machine".

In 147 languages.

"Brother's keeper"? Find me 1 person who doesn't "don't want to get involved". Excepting present company, of course (you & I & friends).