Find The Boots

I hear lots of complaints from fellow travelers about having to remove their shoes during the security process. Over on FlyerTalk, they're even talking about staging protests about it. They call it the "shoe carnival."

I don't understand what the big deal is. Wear socks. If taking your shoes off and putting them back on again is such a big hassle, perhaps you need to spend a little more time on the exercise bike. Frankly, it only takes an extra 30 seconds out of my day to put my shoes through the X-ray machine.

Richard Reid got on an airplane with shoes full of C4. If he hadn't been such a complete idiot and knew how to detonate C4 that plane would have gone down and hundreds would have died. We can either require shoes to go through the xray machines, or we can swab everyone that goes through security. Frankly, I'd rather they swab everyone, but I don't see the big deal with removing your shoes. Especially when the downside is that someone might blow up the plane I'm on.

I dunno. It seems to me that the people that are complaining the most about security are in serious denial about the terrorist threat. Terrorists aren't a minor inconvenience and they're not just criminals. We are at war. The other side is taking this seriously. The World War II generation must get a real giggle about how we complain about the sacrifices we have to make.