A father's journey into relevance. 21st Century Dad...

My family is going to be flying to Mexico this Saturday. Yesterday I was talking with my kids about what I learned from Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat". He does a very good job of explaining the root causes of why we will be getting up at 4am for a 9am flight.

So my kids and I started talking about taking off our shoes when going through security, and why we started to do that. I explained how it was pointless, because "those bent on doing us harm" (I don't want to raise any NSA flags with the "T"-word) would say "Oh, they're onto us with the shoe thing. Better move to the _____ thing." It might make a lot of people feel more secure, but it won't really make them more secure. My kids are 13 and 11 years old. They get it.

This led my intelligent children to start talking about new ways that people might think of doing harm. They talked about ingesting dangerous liquids, and then vomiting them out. Then they started talking about using other bodily functions to cause things to go "boom" (I did mention that they are 13 and 11, right?).

We are going to have a field day at the dinner table tonight with the latest security alert. There is now a ban on bringing liquids, gels and lotions onto the airplane. The exceptions are baby formula, breast milk, or juice for small kids travelling with an adult. It doesn't define what a small kid is. So some poor 7-year-old might just get his juice box taken away. Deoderant or toothpaste for those long flights? Forget it. Guh-ross! Drops for those contact lenses? Better wear your glasses. Chapped hands from the cabin air? Live with it.

And how will they know that the stuff really is breast milk?