From The Archives of Shame

I've only met one person who worked for Homeland Security in my travels. He was a bastard.

We were in Cyprus evacuating and there were many women with small children. They had loaded us up at the crack of dawn (from the refugee center) and taken us to the Cypriot airport. We waited and waited. The C 130s could only hold a hundred passengers each. Our group was in line and the next plane was having trouble so we just had to stand there and guard our places. One woman I had run into several times in the years preceeding our fateful day...a muslim woman from Louisiana....was having problems guarding her own place from her own daughter...a girl who had married a muslim man and "reverted" and then, the mother in law had "reverted" and was in Lebanon in order to take care of her autistic grandson because her daughter was obviously a bit selfish. Anyways...as we were waiting, another busload of us appeared and they just made a line by ours and when they opened up the screening booth, they just hopped right in before us..we'd been waiting almost four hours.

Well...the little kids were getting dehydrated and the poor mothers in our tribe were having a hard time. My powerful friend had taken the previous cargo jet outta Cyprus so it left no one but me to protect our little hapless band of idgits.

So I stepped up to the plate..there was nothing I could do about the "line cutters" who had arrived after us because this mofo from Homeland Security just didn't care about First Come First Serve...he hated us all because afterall, we were mostly LEBANESE Americans and children. So....I went up and told him that the babies and women need to go FIRST. They were getting massively dehydrated and in fact, one flaked out Lebanese woman who was the wife of a doctor had completely lost it and was getting medical attention from the airport nurses and medics (who, by the way asked ME if they should give her some valium so I asked her doctor husband who was used to the woman's neuroses and he said, point blank, "no" and neither one of them could look at me during the long haul to Newark because his wife had started yelling at me because I said to her: Are you maybe hysterical?).

So the Homeland Security guy treated me like I had no right to be a nurse and talk about the Titanic Method of "women and children first" and was just such a major asshole.

I asked for his name. And a piece of paper to assign numbers to my tribe so that the women and children could go have a diaper change and a drink without losing their place in line to the usurpers. He denied me a piece of paper! Said I was just screwing everything up and I had no "authority" to do such a thing!

I said fine. It's on you buddy if one of these babies goes into a hypovolemic crisis (many of the kids had diarrhea as well from the uncertain conditions we'd been bathing and eating in for four days).

Finally he followed me and said, "here is some water...go distribute it."

And I said NO. YOU DO IT. IT IS YOUR JOB.

So...I got my tribe through on the next C130 (a whole collection of short stories in that tale!) using my number system which completely foiled the attempts of other line breakers to further delay our departure....and you know what?

In the waiting area of the Cypriot airport....where I had to rush to find my children because I SWORE to my tribe that I'd be the last to board and if anyone had babies, they'd go before me with MY OWN CHILDREN....all the mommies and daddies came up and thanked me.

Homeland Security my ass. They are Nazis and don't give a damn about humans. They are sick little bureaucrats drunk on their own authority.

My two cents.