Exclusive: Gina Loudon shares account of being trapped in bureaucratic nightmare
I talk a lot about the encroachment of government into our private lives. People call those of us with a healthy disdain for government “paranoid” or “conspiratorial,” but this weekend I experienced it firsthand.
I was so pleased to get to fly to Minnesota to speak and sign books for an amazing group of patriots fighting for the very lives of our children in brave ways. More on that later.
The flight out was so frustrating that I took to social media writing: “I wish there were ever ONE time when I got on a commercial flight and didn’t feel like I might be that person that goes bat crazy because I am in such a herded rage by the time I sit down!”
I ended up tossed between bureaucratic failures so that I stood in three security lines before finally being permitted onto a plane. But that was nothing compared to what happened on the way home.
On the way home, the TSA detained me for a bottle of lotion. Couldn’t they have taken one look at me and known I do not fit the profile of a terrorist? Couldn’t they have opened the lotion and realized that it was merely … lotion? I begged them during my groping to let me go because I had arranged to fly home early to see my children in their costumes for our church harvest festival (Halloween day). I begged that I was missing my flight. Instead, I was taken to the manager.
They had no sympathy, and the TSA agent warned his manager in front of me that “this could escalate.” I was dangerous. I became the whole focus of all of the TSA agents in security because I was not compliant. After a long series of hassles they put me through, and the confiscation of my harmless, but expensive personal property that was not overweight (the label read 6.5 ounces, but it was half empty), they let me go just as my flight was announcing its departure.
I missed my flight.
I decided to use the time until my new flight to get a broken nail fixed. I dragged all of my luggage around to the other terminal of the airport to get to the nail place, and by this point, I realized I had a raging headache from holding in all the things I wanted to say to the TSA.
I waited for the nail tech to come. When she arrived, I told her what I needed. She sadly informed me that she couldn’t help me. The EPA (Environmental “Protection” Agency) had ruled that they didn’t have proper ventilation in the airport, so they could no longer do what was needed to fix my broken nail. I asked her if they could then file all of my nails to the same length. Again, she couldn’t comply. The type of files used for that were not allowed because they are “dangerous” in an airport.
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