Criminals From An Early Age
Welcome to obedience school -- we're being schooled from the earliest ages on in being docile in the face of our rights being yanked from us. Wendy McElroy has a piece on fff.org about how the police state is creeping in to yet another area of our lives:

Since September, a public-school district in Florida has been taking fingerprint scans at the entrance to schools as a way to monitor attendance. The scans are compared against a database of students to detect truants. As in most highly intrusive school policies, parents are thrown a bone of control by allowing them to request an "opt out" for their children. An opted-out student needs to pursue a teacher and go through a special sign-in every day. In terms of time, convenience, and avoidance of stigma, students have a strong incentive to comply quietly.

...The institutions and interactions of society are slowly coming to resemble a prison yard.A key and defining feature of America's prison system is that the people being processed through it have no rights whatsoever that the authorities feel required to consider. Prisoners are caged like animals, removed from familial and other free exchanges, strip-searched at a guard's whim, beaten with no legal recourse, and forced into a de facto "slave" labor.

In goose step with law enforcement, society at large moves gradually toward the zero-tolerance mass-processing of people who have no rights the authorities need to recognize. Travelers are physically molested and interrogated before being given the privilege of using tickets they've paid for. Children attending government schools pursuant to mandatory-attendance laws are fingerprinted as a condition of receiving the schooling or school-bus rides for which their parents are heavily taxed.

In society at large, people are said to surrender their natural rights when they agree to use "services," such as air travel. That is, when you buy a plane ticket, you are deemed to be giving permission to have your body and property rummaged, to have your privacy stripped away, and to face the prospect of being arrested for such trivial noncompliance as asking a question.

In vain, people argue that the air-travel "service" is a usurpation of the free market by a government monopoly that demands all providers comply with government security. The arguments fall on deaf ears, because the people to whom they are addressed are the civil equivalents of prison guards.

Agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are there to herd and process potential criminals. Their job is to elicit obedience; they do not listen, and they do not care, because either of those responses would be antithetical to their job description. This is true of all the agents used to process masses of people, from sports fans to grade-school children.

The effect on the prison population, whether it lives behind gray walls or walks the streets, is predictable. We obey without question; it becomes so habitual that, at some point, questions do not come to mind.