I am at the airport. I say to the Homeland Security official: ”I have a total hip replacement.  You want to check me?”

“You come with me, Sir.”

We walk all of three yards away, where a specially appointed official is waiting to inspect potential terrorists.  I reflect that they are fifty years out of date.  I probably terrorized my kids when they were little, but stopped.

“I am now going to pat you down, Sir.  Would you prefer to have me do this in private.”

“Not a bit of it.  I am happy for everyone to see their dollars at work.”

“Stand legs apart and arms out by your sides, please”.

“I would prefer a woman to be doing this.”

“I’m sorry, Sir, that is not possible.”

“What I had in mind was a blonde twenty-one year old with long, shapely legs”.

“You can only request a female searcher if you are in Key West”.

“How many people do you get with hip replacements every day?

“About two hundred.”

“And they are all patted down?”

“Yes, Sir, those are the orders.”

“Do you find many people over 70 who are signed up with al Queda?”

“I don’t make the rules, Sir.”
  
P.S:  I wrote this short report of a conversation a year ago as an aide memoire.  This week, passing through security before a flight, I discovered that the latest technology eliminates the physical pat-down.  Which cheerfully goes to prove that someone out there is thinking about the inappropriate and primeval idea of pat-downs by total strangers.  If one looks for improvements in life you can often find them.

There are 58 million Americans with physical and mental disabilities. If you have a disability in the U.S, you’re twice as likely to be poor as someone without a disability. You’re also far more likely to be unemployed. According to the Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell University, 28.4 percent of disabled adults worked in 1990, compared with 14.4 percent in 2013. And that gap has widened in the 25 years since the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted. The ADA banned discrimination based on disability and was intended to ensure equal opportunity in employment — as well as government services and public accommodations, commercial facilities and public transportation.

Just having a job is highly unusual for someone with a disability. Fewer than 1 in 5 disabled adults are employed, one reason so many are poor. Problems involve available and adequate transport designed to take them in wheelchairs, the lack of ramps into buildings, lifts onto buses and access to trains. Once in a place of work, there is no room to manoeuver your wheelchair. If you are manually handicapped, using a mouse can be a very slow process. Many companies think the disabled to be not up to the job, any job, or they think hiring them is not worth the effort. Some employers are scared to hire the disabled because they don’t know what kind of accommodations they require. And if they don’t meet what is considered to be reasonable accommodations, they’re afraid of being sued.

The system is not set up to succeed. If recipients of federal disability payments save more than $2,000, they risk losing their benefits, including medical care. So people have to hide their savings or the benefits are cut off (this is being eased somewhat). (based an article by NPR)

The Kel-Tec PF-9, 9mm pistol handgun used to kill the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 has apparently been sold for $250,000 (£172,000). It was put up for auction by George Zimmerman, who was charged and acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

The killing was instrumental in launching the national Black Lives Matter social movement and demonstrates the moral bankruptcy both of Zimmerman and his supporters in the NRA.

Zimmerman backed out of another, lower priced deal with a Mr. Honeycutt, who said “I thought he was a man of his word”. Give me a break! How can anyone talk about someone’s “word” in the face of an utterly immoral transaction that profits from the death of an innocent man walking home from a shop, minding his own business. Gun rights advocates say he was exercising his legal rights under US law. Invading Iraq was “legal” as well. To give a taste of Zimmerman’s world view, he called GunBroker, another gun dealer involved in the affair, “Nazi-loving liberal liars”. Charming.

The Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump told Fox the sale was “offensive, outrageous and insulting”. You bet!