Poem: The Trip (A little girl and the airports body scanners)

The Trip

A little girl
So excited
Traveling
To a far off land.

Finally her mother had saved enough money for the journey.

She walked through
A long line
Waiting
But soon
She would be
With her grandmother.

She thought about all of the letters her grandmother had written
The photos she had sent
All stating a grandmother’s love
For a precious child.

At the end of the line,
She looked up
Seeing something scary
A hand
Tried to usher her through
The girl looked up
It looked like
A huge hospital machine
But she was not sick
She was excited.

So she said, “no, i can’t”
She got dragged off
Her body violated
All her private parts touched
By a stranger
All that was hers
Her innocence
Taken away.

And they said, “You can go now.”
But she sat on the floor, crying
Her body touched
The perpetrator screamed, “Move!
Don’t cry.
It’s for your own good.
It’s for your own safety!
My God, STOP CRYING!!!”

But the little girl felt like her body had been violated,
Because it had been
Her mother was called
She was taken home
She never got to see her grandmother
She never got her innocence back
So much was lost on that day.

But the loss was not only for that little girl
It was a loss for a whole country
Who touted freedom
While taking it away.

While the ignorant country cried, “Do it, we have nothing to fear.”

While the bill of rights, disappeared.
End airport violations now
No x-rays for the healthy
No body searches for anyone
Freedom
And only to be searched
If there is a warrant
And this will cause us to have
The most liberty and the most safety for all.

I wrote this poem because of the situation going on with TSA at the airport. According to University of San Fransisco scientist, by going through the X-ray machines there the possibility of skin damage, sperm damage, cornea damage and Thymus damage that needs to be studied further. They also stated that “The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic
ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this
comparison is very misleading…” (To see the full letter http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2010/11/5810/ucsf-scientists-speak-out-against-airport-full-body-scans)

These X-rays are the same type of X-rays that patients use a lead shield from at the dentist. And for the few people who are unlucky enough to get the enhanced pat down, that can easily be considered sexual assault. (There are two different enhanced pat downs, the worst is where they stick their hands inside your pants and touch your genitals twice.) Most people get neither but you can never be safe from the threat of these assaults until they are outlawed. By the way TSA has never stopped a single terrorist. But we have lost all of our civil liberties.