In which I agree (somewhat) with Jonah Goldberg

It’s not every day that I even bother to read Jonah Goldberg’s column, much less agree with the basic sentiments in it. But today is a different day.

Goldberg recounts the story of Lena Reppert, a wheelchair-bound, dying nonagenarian being escorted by her daughter to a nursing home out of state. The staff of the Transportation Security Administration searched Ms. Reppert in a way that made her daughter conclude that she had to remove her mother’s adult diaper, humiliating enough in itself, and then rush to catch her plane, lacking a second diaper with which to protect her mother’s dignity. Goldberg calls for a rebellion against this suspicion of passengers by TSA.

I don’t follow Goldberg’s railing all the way back to ethnic profiling, which he would clearly prefer to the current approach taken by the TSA—that everyone is a suspect. A mother who brings water or juice boxes for her children through security (yes, this happened to me). A baby, inspected out of the sightline of his mother. Lena Reppert. But I do agree with Goldberg’s basic sense that TSA staff often act like machines, at the expense of their discretionary, human judgment.

Although I have traveled by plane only infrequently in the years since 9/11, when I have flown, I have often wondered about what working for TSA must do to a person’s soul. What does it mean to a person to be trained by his employer—the federal government, no less—that all other human beings must be regarded as possible terrorists and treated accordingly, with no milk of human kindness to ameliorate what most rational Americans recognize is a sadly necessary level of screening? If you work for TSA, do you carry your work attitude home with you? Do you fear the children in the playground and treat them with the same distance and disdain you do at work? How many people quit their jobs at TSA because of what it does to them, inside?

I am fortunate enough to have work that I love to do. I realize that this is a privilege that I should not take lightly, a product of my class, educational, and generational contexts. Most humans in the present, as well as in the past, have had to labor under bad conditions for goals that they may not value personally. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to do the kind of work that I have. Not that everyone should be a professor, but that everyone should enjoy the chance to do work that they believe makes a substantive contribution to bettering the human condition and receive adequate compensation for their labors. This is the dignity of work, to my mind. I wish for everyone the chance to do work that elevates them personally, rather than degrades them.