A funny thing happened on the way to Vegas

A few weeks ago, I was at Southwest's terminal in the Oakland airport, running late for a flight home to Las Vegas when I was randomly selected for a search. Though I knew it was useless to protest, I pointed out with a certain amount of profanity that I was going to miss my plane because of the long line I'd been waiting on — the line actually started outside the terminal — and now a random search. Nonetheless, I brought my two heavy suitcases over to security, and they began taking everything out. One suitcase was entirely full of books (articles certainly deemed highly suspicious under these days of the Bush administration), and the TSA agent carefully flipped through each one individually, I suppose on the off chance of finding some sinister secret compartment. I'm sure I aggravated him a little by mentioning that I hadn't had much respect for airport security as I've more than once brought mace on board by forgetting to take it off my keychain.

The guard was pretty careless with my books and wound up bending back the cover of one of them and then piling five or six others on top before I caught his mistake. Though I admit it was an overreaction, I yelled at the agent and his supervisor, "My property is being damaged! He's damaging my property!" The search officer undid the fold as soon as he heard me, but not before a representative of Southwest airlines had come to tell me in no uncertain times that my airline ticket would be taken away and refunded if I did not stop raising my voice.

The truth is I was ready to stop yelling even before the Southwest agent came over and tried to shut me up. I was sure she couldn't possibly have meant what she said or intended its implications, so I started to yell even louder. I yelled about freedom of speech. I yelled about how Stalin would have kicked me off the plane for daring to complain, but that this was America, and decades after Stalin's death, at that. I wanted to make a point, and I never thought the woman would actually rip up my plane ticket in front of me and boot me out of the terminal. More accurately, it was actually an Oakland police officer who rough-handled me and dragged me out of the terminal. He didn't even ask what had happened before he grabbed me. I guess having an opinion is enough to be considered a threat to security when in an airport.

If I'm to believe this officer (who subsequently took my name to check for outstanding arrest warrants) what I did — that is, yelling at all in an airport — made me liable to arrest. It was bizarre. I was without an airplane ticket, publicly rough-handled like a criminal and told I was acting irresponsibly by not filing a paper complaint. What a fool I was to think of my right to an opinion.

Worse than the incident has been the responses I've gotten when I tell the story. It's almost always been, "Well you know, you can't scream in an airport." It's an automatic reaction: They don't think why this should be some sort of universal rule, they just accept it.

From non-Americans, the response has been almost universally the opposite: head shaking and agreement that the incident was ridiculous but consistent with general American cow-like mentality of following the rules without question. We Americans love to talk about freedom, but we're quicker than anyone else to start putting stupid limitations on them. Airports offer a particularly interesting paradox in America; we don't want any racial profiling in airports, but we can't have any screaming either. Racism is bad, that's true, but so are limitations on free speech last time I checked.

To those who say, "You can't scream in an airport," I say, why not? Would it have been different if the agents were stealing from me? Or had fondled me? Or had used some sort of racial slur? I doubt the Southwest agent's response would have been any different. I know the police officer didn't even know what my complaint was until he had already rough-handled me and gotten me out of the terminal.

Two ironies complete my experience. First, that I passed a billboard later that week for Southwest that used, "Freedom" in the company's slogan. The second was that I found myself again "randomly selected" for additional security searches when I took a different flight later that day. There were about ten people in front of me on the special search line, all women and children. Aileen Nielsen is an anthropology major from Brooklyn, N.Y. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.