It is stunning that the NYPD has decided that they will inspect bags of commuters on the NY subway system. The stunning part is that the searches will be random. Random? As if no one knows who the perpetrators of a bombing would be. As if we are just oblivious to the fact that 99% of terrorist acts are performed by young, middle-eastern, males. No matter, the searches will be random. Ten year old redheads will have their backpacks searched. Just in case. Seventy year old guys wearing lime-green slacks, golf shirts, and white shoes will have their bowling bags checked. You can never tell what might be in them.
We've become so afraid to face and tell the truth in any matter involving race or ethnicity that we're reduced to truly bizarre play-acting. There's not a soul who rides the trains or checks the bags who thinks random searches are anything more than feel-good liberalism. The liberal thinks that the important thing is that whatever we do, no one be offended by it. Whether it's effective or not is only secondary. Like the citizens who turned out to admire the emperor's new clothes, oohing and ahhing at their splendor while watching a manifestly naked emperor riding through the street, everyone seems duty-bound to pretend that young, middle-eastern males shouldn't be any more suspect than anyone else. If liberals could control our thoughts as well as our actions they'd have us all experience astonishment every time a terrorist bombing turned out to be perpetrated by Arab Muslims.
So we all agree to make-believe that you just can't predict who would be a terrorist based on looks because that's the politically correct thing to do. We all nod knowingly when someone avers that, after all, Timothy McVeigh wasn't a Saudi Muslim, but if you're sitting in an airport waiting to board your flight and you see a couple of swarthy Pakistani males with a dead look in their eyes waiting to board the same plane, all your PC liberalism goes into the dumpster and the needle on your anxiety meter nudges the red. If you deny this then you're either not being honest with us or yourself. Or, like Rip van Winkle, you've just awakened from a thirty year snooze.