Confiscated Knives

Update: June 11  2013.  The DHS has given up and withdrawn their brave suggestion.  No small knives may menace the hamstrings of flight attendants.   It's a good thing.  Sigh 

The United States Department of Homeland Security has taken at least four Swiss Army knives away from me.  That's because for at least the last 30 years I have always carried one of the Swiss army's smallest and simplest in my right front pocket. Having it there I feel equipped for every contingency -- until at an airport security point of no return.  Once there you cannot cut or talk your way out of anything.

So I was greatly relieved when the word was that DHS was contemplating allowing knives of slightly more than two inches to be welcomed aboard.  My blade is just one and 5/8 inches.  It serves to open packages and letters mostly.  The scissors are as valued, as is the nail file with the screw driver end.  A handy hole punch and a small light suitable for finding keyholes in the dark round out its features.

I once contemplated writing the Swiss embassy in Washington to  recommend that their country ignore the contradiction in terms and issue a knife without the blade, perhaps replacing it with a Phillips head screw driver or tweezers. They could call it the Swiss Army Flying Toolkit.

But now I hear that DHS is reconsidering.  Flight crew organizations are understandably opposed.  So it looks like we are in for a period of bureaucratic dithering. A professional bureaucrat once advised his colleagues, "When in doubt, mumble."  This too is understandable, if unlikeable, even in the Facebook sense.

It is not easy being a bureaucrat. Your day is filled with making arbitrary decisions that are bound to please no one. Your desk mates -- and your boss -- are apt to be the kind of petty tyrants who enjoy the work. The fine line distinctions you are forced to make are subject to ridicule by a legislative body who wrote the ambiguous (at best) laws you must interpret.

Sympathy for the bureaucrat's catch 22 will not keep my knife in my pocket, however.  Maybe if the NRA, once they achieve the right to concealed Berettas in college backpacks, would plump for the obvious Second Amendment right to extend the same courtesy to the flying public's pen knives, flight attendants will give up and let me tidy my finger nails aloft. One can have hope with the NRA on your side to help you stand your ground.