I heard the crying
as soon as I entered the security line: London Heathrow, Monday, 7am. I turned
to follow the cries and finally found a little girl in an adjacent line
clutching her mother’s long hair as her mother bounced her in her arms. The
child, maybe one year old, was tiny, but she wailed and sobbed and breathed in
long gasps that seemed to rattle everyone in line. She was inconsolable; she
wouldn’t sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with her mother, wouldn’t drink from
her bottle, wouldn’t engage the string of toys her father kept pushing into her
hands.
I sent
compassionate thoughts to the family, tried to will her parents patience, tried
to ease the girl’s pain. Suddenly, two paramedics on bicycles arrived, another
man with a two-way radio, a uniformed airline representative. Someone had
reported an ill child, I overheard; the paramedics were worried the child was too
sick to fly. The mother shook her head: the girl wasn’t sick, just tired and
overwhelmed.
Even so, the
security response shifted into high gear. The rest of us wore our shoes through
the x-ray machine, but security insisted the entire family remove their shoes,
a member of the security team pulling the girl’s red sneakers from her feet as
she kicked and flung her body into her mother’s chest and stomach. Then two men
and her father wrenched her from her mother so her mother could walk through
the scanner alone.
The final
insult: security personnel insisted the father take a sip from each bottle of formula
carefully packed in plastic bags. Sip after sip with a cadre of security
standing in a circle watching. “We’ll just leave it,” I heard the father say,
but he pushed on, a grown man drinking his child’s formula, his child still
screaming, weeping, the mother’s desperation, now, that they would miss their
flight.
And I
thought, this child is the only sane person in the entire security line. Of
course she is terrified, of course she is screaming—nothing about what she is
witnessing makes any sense.
I started
flying alone when I was 6 years old. A flight attendant was assigned to care
for me from the moment one parent left me on the plane until the moment another
one picked me up. I was given bags of toys on each flight: metal Delta pins,
coloring books and crayons, comic books about flying. I loved the magic of it,
how I dressed up, how someone always sneaked me extra snacks, how the pilots
let me peak into the cockpit.
I know we’re
all supposed to believe times have changed, the world has changed, we need
extra security measures to keep us safe. But watching security’s response to
this family, to this crying child, knowing another passenger in line had
reported them, seeing how little compassion they were shown—well, it makes me
sad for all of us. It makes me sad for the kind of world we’re allowing
ourselves to inhabit.
Planet of the Blind 