A New Meaning for the "Little Black Box"

This story in today's Newsday is either absolutely outrageous or somewhat believable in the current climate of American paranoia. A seventeen-year-old boy caused his flight from LaGuardia to Louisville, Kentucky to be prematurely grounded in Philadelphia, all because he strapped on his tefillin to pray. Used in the Jewish tradition, tefillin are small cubic leather boxes painted black which contain scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, with black leather straps attached. Tefillin are worn by devout Jewish men during prayer as a sign and remembrance that God brought the Jewish people out of Egypt. The flight attendant must have assumed that his prayer device was actually a detonation device or a bomb of some sort.

Really, Transportation Security Administration? Not only do you take away our tweezers, nail clippers, and liquids at the door (because God forbid we might want to groom ourselves on board), but now you ground a plane because a 17-year-old Jewish boy was praying. Now I ask you--where does this stop? This is an instance of sheer stupidity and ignorance. But all that aside, may I also ask why is it that we wait until people are on the plane and up in the air before we question whether or not they want to blow up it up? Guess what--if somebody wants to blow up a plane and kill people these days, they are going to do it and there is nothing we can do about it. That's a scary thought, but unless things change in Homeland Security's policy and in our airport security procedures, this will continue to be the climate of the day.

There is something we can do. America needs to face the facts and copy Israel's security check and subsequently have less flights, limit the amount of visas granted to foreigners to enter this country, and do away with the ideology that we can go on living like nothing is wrong, even though we are currently in a "war on terror." We cannot have it both ways, people. Either we suck it up and compromise, sacrificing some of our comforts and amenities, or we resolve ourselves to the fact that if we want to keep our frequent flights and the convenience of unrestricted travel, then we will continue living in fear of another terrorist attack.

The irony of all this: that boy was probably praying that there were no terrorists on the plane.