It’s been an emotional few weeks for me. First, the horrific news of USC being severely punished for the crimes of Reggie Bush (may he rot in everlasting pig manure). Then, LA reclaims the NBA throne from the Celtics, which makes up for about 50% of the two bowl games the Trojans are banned from. I wondered if LA and Boston would ever get the chance to be true rivals again, and beating them is only made more satisfactory by the fact that Rasheed Effing Wallace made it so far, only to lose. Ha, ha.

I was low, then high, and now find myself back in the depths of confusion and anger. Why, do you ask? After getting back from the airport yesterday, I found that my luggage had been tossed and TSA had kindly left a love note for me.

“Dear Citizen,” it read. “Our number one priority is you. That’s why we’ve searched your luggage without your permission. We know there’s this pesky thing called the Fourth Amendment, but we just can’t help ourselves. After all, arbitrarily invading the private property of US Citizens on low-risk domestic flights really gets us turned on. Turned on about safety. The items you packed made us so hot that it just wasn’t safe to allow them on the plane. So we’ve taken off with your chonies to protect national security. We salute your patriotism.”

Yes, that’s right. Your tax dollars have paid federal employees to violate the Bill of Rights AND relieve me of my underwear.

I recently had the privilege to see Penn and Teller in Las Vegas. They do a great bit with a metal detector, demonstrating how utterly useless it is in making us safe. All of our so-called flight safety restrictions are reactionary, time consuming, costly, and can’t be demonstrated to have made anybody safer in the skies. The illusionists displayed a small metal copy of the Bill of Rights (available for purchase at their gift shop), and used the copy to set off the alarm in a great object lesson about the violations of personal liberty that we’ve come to accept in the name of political correctness. Everyone — US citizen and foreigner alike — is now subject to being searched without a warrant. No common sense is applied, and everyone, from a bottle-sucking baby to a grandma with an oxygen tank, is subjected to the same search procedures as terrorists. How did we come to believe this was OK?

I’ve seen mothers have baby formula taken away from them, leaving toddlers screaming. I’ve seen ladies have expensive bottles of smelly lotion tossed from their bags. The regulations we have in place use no common sense; objects and people are not evaluated for their threat; they merely need to be the right shape and size, and in a clear baggie. And that, somehow, makes us safe.

I’ve been subject to search and seizure that seems pretty damn contrary to the Fourth Amendment. What probable cause justifies digging into a non-suspicious black bag? What right does the government have to lay their hands on my things without a warrant? If my underwear is what they consider a threat to the United States, then I can safely say we are all doomed.