Leadership Quote by John Mica

Mica’s line works because it turns airport security into a grim comedy of improvisation: a bureaucracy forever arriving one catastrophe late, stacking new rituals atop old ones until the passenger becomes the instrument being inspected. The rhythm is the point. “First... then... then... now...” is a drumbeat of accumulation, a legislative indictment disguised as a traveler’s gripe. Each step escalates from the mildly annoying (box cutters) to the bodily invasive (“private areas”), mapping how “safety” can steadily annex dignity.

The intent is political, but it’s also performative. By listing widely remembered flashpoints - 9/11 box cutters, the shoe bomber, the liquids plot, the underwear/“diaper” bomber - Mica taps a shared timeline of fear that most Americans can recite without looking it up. He’s not debating risk analysis; he’s prosecuting the optics: the TSA as a machine that converts public panic into permanent procedure.

The subtext is about legitimacy. “Reactionary” isn’t just “responsive”; it implies intellectually lazy, more interested in appearing tough than being effective. The mention of pat-downs “in our private areas” deliberately courts outrage, framing security policy as a slow creep from public protection into quasi-humiliation.

Context matters: post-9/11 security politics rewarded visible action, even when the evidence for effectiveness was murky. Mica leverages that tension, suggesting that when agencies are judged by whether they did something after the last attempt, they’ll keep doing more to everyone - not smarter things to the next threat.