I Am Just Sayin'

  I've been noticing a few things, lately. I've never really been one to run around frantically waving the racism flag, but now that more and more Caucasians are being stopped at border crossings, pulled out of the line at airports and subjected to pat-down searches, there's been a great public outcry about civil rights and where is the line between security and invasion of privacy and what about personal space and.....
  In December 1998, a time of a much stronger dollar, a group of friends and I were getting together for a New Year's Eve party in Vancouver, B.C. There were about fifteen or twenty of us total leaving from Seattle at various times in about five or six vehicles. It was about to be 1999 and we were about to party like it was. We weren't the only ones with this idea: the border was packed. It took maybe three hours once we got to the Peace Arch to actually reach the border. And this is where the show began.
  In crossing the border, your progress slows immensely when you approach the actual checkpoint. There's almost nothing to do but watch those in front of you. So, you sit there and watch car after car inch forward, stop for a few moments and a chat with a border guard and then continue on their way. Except for a few. Out of the five-hundred or so cars that were clogging the gates, I saw[or noticed] four vehicles directed out of the line and searched. There was a car full of young Asian girls, a couple of olive complected young men in a sporty little two seater, some other car that at this point [some thirteen years hence] my memory fails to recall, and our car[an older VW mini station wagon with oxidized white]which was populated by myself[the black man], my friend Simon[the driver with the ponytail and slightly Asian features] and my other friend John[the hairdresser with the ring in his eyebrow].
  In October 2005,  myself and three other fellow employees flew to Spokane, Washington where we were to rent two trucks and drive to Bozeman, Montana to pick up a warehouse full of furniture and that which occupied the attached showroom and bring this back to Seattle. SeaTac International Airport found the four of us obviously unrelated men with one way tickets and carry on luggage[Gary; the large, Germanic bear, Chris; the large Celtic man, Phillip; the tall, lanky Pole and Me, The Black Man] separated from the queue, instructed to remove our shoes and subjected to the 'Wand Search'.
  There were obvious legitimate reasons for these inspections and I fully expected such scrutiny. However, at the time, there was also the feeling that these incidents would not have occurred had I not been a member of either of these groups. My traveling companions agreed. We also pretty much agreed that this was status quo.
  Over the past thirty years or so I, and people like me, have gotten used to being shadowed by department store detectives, being approached by security when someone else set off a store alarm through ignorance or arrogance, watching people run back to check their car doors as we walked through our own neighborhoods while heading back from the grocery and being the first to have their ID checked even though we're more than twice the legal drinking age.
  Only now that everyone is being checked, the world is beginning to cry "Foul!"