Loss of Personhood = Loss of Citizenship?

Many years ago in the early 1980s my father had triple bypass surgery at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. At that time "Peter Bent" was considered one of the top hospitals in the country.

After Dad came out of recovery and was sent to the Cardiac Care ICU, we were allowed to visit him two at a time for no more than 15 minutes. While my younger brother and I were sitting with him, we saw a stretcher bearing an obviously just operated upon patient being conveyed to the unit by a group of young persons we assumed were either interns or medical students. The group was boisterous, loudly talking and laughing. One of its members jumped up to take a ride on the stretcher bearing the patient. Joe and I looked at each other in horror, then back at the group, which had by then seen us. The hitchhiker quickly jumped off and the group quieted down until it was out of our line of vision, whereupon we could hear whispered giggling and shushing. Fortunately Dad was pretty much out of it and unaware of the episode.

We reported the incident to whoever was in charge of the unit, but did not sign a formal complaint because we did not want our father to suffer retribution. When Dad finally was released from the hospital, he was sent home with not one but two staf infections that slowed his recovery for many weeks and resulted in a prolonged stay in his local hospital.

The response of the TSA and administration officials to the public's complaints about the new airport security measures, including their response to the humiliation of a man with an ostemy bag that was dislodged during a "pat down," reminds me of that incident. Officials react with abysmal indifference, reiterating the public has no choice, this is the way it must and shall be. Like those young hospital interns, to the TSA, the bloated bureaucracy of Homeland Security and our government officials, we are not proud citizens of the United States of America, once the greatest democracy on earth, we are faceless nonentities.

This is NOT a Democrat vs. Republican or Liberal vs. Conservative issue. It is about sacrificing our freedom for the illusion of safety. The same institutions that permit powerful corporations to gamble our pension funds on esoteric financial instruments, that reward wealthy companies that ship our jobs overseas, that raid the Social Security trust fund to conceal their irresponsible fiscal policies, that leave our energy, transportation, military and water supply infrastructures vulnerable to physical and cyber attacks and refuse to screen the freight imported into the country because it is "too hard," have no scruples about blatantly disrespecting our persons and taking umbrage at our protests.

I have heard many, many liberal voices supporting the new TSA protocols. Why are both the left and the right so damn selective about the constitutional rights that matter to them?

Note: This is NOT an attack on TSA security personnel at the gate, most of these folks have treated me courteously in my encounters with them. It is about the post 9/11 attitude of this country's institutions, which have increasingly seen American citizens as part of the problem rather than the key to the solution.