Other people wax rhapsodic about riding Hawaii’s great waves; I could go on and on about the pleasures of eating warm popovers with sweet whipped butter and poha berry jam at the Orchids restaurant in Waikiki. For me, the poha berry jam is what makes this an island breakfast. Also known as cape gooseberries, poha berries came to Hawaii before 1825 and can be found on all of the islands. They have a sweet tartness and orange color similar to the cloudberry, another rare fruit that I’m rather fond of. One could say that tpoha berry jam is my version of Proust’s madeleine, a symbol of an earlier chapter in my life, when I came to Hawaii with my children and their father and his mother rather than alone.
On a recent vacation there, I indulged in poha berry jam with popovers for breakfast not once but two successive mornings in a row. On my last full day on Oahu, I bought a jar of poha berry jam to take home. Packing that night, I put the jam in the middle of my bag, and my tiny jars of macadamia blossom honey into the zip-locked plastic bag with the other liquids like face creams and mascara. I got to the airport an hour ahead of schedule, picked up my boarding pass and headed for the security line. The noise of people talking and bags rolling was punctuated by the frequent announcements that the airport was experiencing an orange-level alert (one step down from red alert and two down from the black alert of a terrorist attack, according to one sign) and that any suspicious person or bag should be reported immediately. When the security agent asked to examine my bag after it passed through the X-ray machine, I wondered if they were concerned about my hair clip with a pointed end. But no, it was my jar of poha berry jam. It had never occurred to me that the prohibition on gels included edible jams and jellies. My other two jars of jam were tiny and fit into the requisite plastic bag, but the poha berry jam was more than 3 ounces. The agent also wanted to take my jar of sea salt because it was more than 3 ounces, but relented when I pointed out that salt, was neither liquid nor a gel. Although she apologized about the poha berry jam, saying, “I know it’s good stuff,” I still burst into tears a few minutes after the ordeal.
If I had been less upset by the implication that I was threatening national security, I could have gone back to the check-in area and put my carry-on bag through to San Francisco with the jam in the bottom of the hold. But losing this one souvenir, which, at least in that moment, symbolized my own lost past, of children at home and an intact marriage, apparently overwhelmed me. With the plane due to take off in less than half an hour, I felt I had little choice but to let go.
Of course, I was welcome to carry aboard any tropical jams, jellies, body lotions or bottles of water that I purchased on the other side of security. After all, we can’t let security concerns interfere with the big businesses that run the airport concessions. How many million dollars would be lost in a single day if no gels or liquids (cosmetics, perfumes, alcohol, coffee) could be sold past the security zone? Isn’t it ironic that we can trust these businesses, and all of the airport personnel to not threaten national security, but we can’t trust ordinary citizens not to pack explosives in their hair gel?
Air travel is the frontier of Homeland security, the place where we are most willing to sacrifice personal freedom in exchange for nebulous promises of safety. After all, if restrictions on water bottles and jars of jam keep the airplane that I’m on, or my daughter, or son, or brother are on from exploding in mid-air, then, like any sane person, I will acquiesce to the restrictions. If the goal were to prevent terrorist attacks, why not just install scanners at every airport that can detect plastic explosives? Or why not ban all gels and liquids of any size from being carried on board or even sold at the airport? Maybe we could have an exception for glasses of water and ceramic cups of coffee which could be purchased to drink at the airport; think of the reduction in wasted paper and plastics.
But instead, the current tactic seems to be to instill fear and anxiety in the nation’s flying public---who are primarily members of the educated, middle to upper middle classes—with, for example, constant reminders that we’re in a state of orange alert (which never seems to go down, even momentarily, to yellow, green, or blue). This state of alert, in turn, is used as a justification for insisting on absolute obedience to a series of annoying restrictions and rules——remove your shoes, the sweater tied around your waist, your laptop, don’t let your 10-year-old crack a joke about a bomb at the airport, which gradually become more numerous and more invasive, no water bottles over 3 ounces, put your toothpaste and contraceptive gel in a transparent plastic bag, remove your belt buckle, let security personnel run a metal detector wand over your breasts if your underwire bra triggers the metal detector, don’t dare to question those in charge for fear of arrest. What if the real goal is not to stop another 9/11, not even to make us feel safer, but to accustom those of us in the middle and professional classes, those of us with the education, money and time to actually question authority, those of us who think our American citizenship gives us the right to do so, and especially those of us who think our race will give us immunity, to living in a police state?
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