Swab the Rick, matey

Ever since the summer of 2005, in the wake of an attack in the London subway system, the NYPD has been conducting "random" searches of travelers' bags at the entranceways to various NYC subway stations. When the policy was first announced, I still retained a shred of naivete about the protections afforded by the US Constitution, and I figured that there was no way that this practice would stand judicial scrutiny. Well, in a "post-9/11 world" there is no measure of civil rights that can't stand to be sacrificed at the altar of "making us safe" and so here we are, three years into the bag-searching regime.

I live near one of the larger subway stations in the city -- the Atlantic Ave/Pacific Street Station-- and I pass through it twice every day during the week. At least once a week during the morning rush the police are set up at the Pacific Street entrance (where I enter) conducting random bag searches. For three years I've walked by them, never quite knowing how to play the situation. Somewhat to my relief, I think, after three years I remain irked by the trappings of a police state, but I never figured out in my mind how much my consternation should influence my conduct if I were to be stopped for a search.

Two mornings ago I entered the subway station with Dinosaur Jr's Start Choppin' blaring through my iPod headphones. Sometimes, depending on the song and my mood, I likes to hear the music loud. A police officer stood in front of the turnstiles, and as I walked towards him he beckoned me towards a table on the left, behind which stood three more officers. One of them said something to me, but I was still fumbling with my iPod in an attempt to turn it off. I placed my bag on the table and defiantly stepped backwards. You want to search my bag, open it your damn self. Instead of searching the contents of my bag, however, the police officer took a small piece of paper, swabbed it across the top of my bag a couple of times, and then stuck the paper into a small machine that resembled a small credit card machine that you might find in a bodega or a dry cleaners. They were testing my bag for explosives.

Did the high-tech screening make it any less invasive? Was the relatively de minimis extent of the inconvenience supposed to render me more complacent? Is anyone feeling safer? Was anyone feeling that unsafe to begin with?

Scared into war, and eventually war becomes the state of being. Scared into giving away some civil rights, and eventually the absence of civil rights becomes the state of being.

Oh there's no goin back to that, I'm so numb, can't even react.