The collateral damage of over-reaching fixes
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Lenore Zimmerman, an 85-year-old grandmother who uses a walker and wears a defibrillator, says she was strip-searched at Kennedy Airport last Tuesday on her way home to Florida.
During 11 minutes at the hands, literally, of Transportation Security Administration agents, her walker slashed her shin and caused bleeding so profuse she had to be treated by a medic.
Mrs. Zimmerman plans to sue the TSA. Millions of ordinary, law-abiding Americans have to be hoping that her story is true and that she wins.
Our reasons may not involve anything so lawsuit-worthy as strip-searches and physical injury -- in fact, my reasons are homework, obesity and beer -- but it takes something as serious as Mrs. Zimmerman's ordeal to provoke the necessary pushback against over-reaching, unreasonable powers-that-be.
And to remind all of us that in our effort to fix every single one of society's many ills, we are needlessly hurting a lot of innocent folk.
• First, the beer: We were visiting Indianapolis on a recent Friday night, looking for a restaurant between convention center and concert hall that could seat our party of six quickly.
We ended up in a big brewpub, and most of the guys ordered a beer. The waiter asked to see their IDs. We laughed. Not one of us was under 32. "You're kidding, right?"
He didn't smile. Even my 53-year-old husband had to produce a driver's license proving he was old enough to enjoy that night's featured lager. How stupid is that?
Somewhat reassuringly, Indiana citizens themselves thought the 2010 law requiring retailers to "card" every purchaser of alcohol -- wrinkles and gray hair notwithstanding -- was so outrageous that lawmakers revised it in May. Now retailers don't have to card anyone who "reasonably" appears to be over the age of 40. 40!
Neither version of the law is going to prevent the sad reality that supposedly motivated it -- underage drinking. Trying to guess whether a customer is 37 or 44 isn't going to stop a 19-year old somewhere from chugging half a bottle of vodka and passing out.
Any injury here? Perhaps to the ego of the acid-peeled and Botox-ed 44-year-old who doesn't get carded.
And there's a loss of time for both retailers and customers. The men's struggle to retrieve wallets from their pants pockets and winter coats in our crowded booth, to hand IDs to the waiter one by one, was a ridiculous delay. It accomplished nothing.
But the most serious loss -- whether at brewpub or airport security -- is the disrespect for government and "the law" in general that these unreasonable measures inspire.
As Mr. Bumble of "Oliver Twist" put it, "The law is a ass -- a idiot." In a representative democracy, how far can that sentiment spread without doing damage to the whole enterprise? If "we the people" are the government, then either we're the idiots, or they work for us.
• Second, has our new war on obesity -- like the wars on terrorism and underage drinking -- spawned idiocy? A Cleveland area third-grader was put into foster care in October because authorities decided his mother wasn't doing enough to help the 200-pound boy lose weight.
His mother, a substitute teacher, had taken him to the doctor a year earlier because he was having breathing problems, which are sometimes weight-related. He was given a breathing machine and put under "protective supervision." His mom put him on a diet and bought him a bike.
He had lost weight but began regaining it in recent months. So the county took custody. Authorities now allow his mother to see him two hours per week.
A mother who seeks help for her son has him ripped from her arms? The otherwise healthy honor roll student is emotionally scarred, perhaps deeply and irrevocably, because we think he's too fat?
• And No. 3: My 16-year-old daughter had so much homework over the Thanksgiving holiday that she paused for little more than sharing the big meal itself. She and her fellow juniors at a fine suburban school are being given academic challenges that I didn't see before my sophomore year in a university honors program.
Government can't solve the problems that cause illiteracy, but we need aggregate test scores to rise, so we crush the spirits of our best, most diligent students. But requiring privileged teens to produce adult-level psychological analysis of literary classics will not make 12-year-old truants able to read.
Carding 50-year-old beer-lovers will not end teen binge-drinking.
Pulling down an 85-year-old's underpants will not end terrorism. In fact, nothing will.
Nothing will end every ill we face. The sooner we re-learn that truth, the less harm we'll do to each other as we work our way, together, through life.
First Published December 5, 2011 12:00 am
