If airport screening were managed by Myles Standish

If the Pilgrims had to pass through TSA to board the Mayflower in 1620, there never would have been a first Thanksgiving.

William Bradford, John Carver and the rest of them on the great voyage would never have agreed to allow King James' men to place their grubby hands all over their breeches and certainly would not have permitted searches of the womenfolk, under their petticoats and all.

Nor would the Pilgrims have permitted the king's guards to peer beneath their doublets with secret picture machines.

It wasn't as if the Pilgrims has anything to hide. I mean, the men wore garters on the outside for everybody to see and King James knew they were trying to leave town.

And it is immaterial that X-ray scanners didn't exist back then because neither did moon-eyed terrorists hiding bombs in their BVD's.

For Pilgrim leaders it was bad enough that they had been turned back twice on their flight to freedom by government threats and the king's soldiers.

If the 103 people trying to sail away from religious persecution had been forced to assume the position and spread 'em, the first Pilgrim massacre would have occurred on the deck of the Mayflower in a British port and they never would have made it here.

But the dock at Plymouth, England, didn't look anything like the TSA security areas at O'Hare. The Pilgrims weren't required to walk a gantlet of $19-an-hour guards in white government shirts and latex gloves. They didn't have their body parts squeezed and scrunched regardless of whether they were old and decrepit and only the only threat they posed was drooling.

If the security planners in 2010 America really believe that indiscriminate frisking and blanket X-rays are the way to insure us against the tyranny of terror, perhaps they should revisit what happened on the Mayflower during that trip across the Atlantic.

The men onboard the ship wrote a plan of government for their new colony.

We still refer to it as the Mayflower Compact. Maybe you remember it from grade school history class?

The agreement promised that the people would actually talk to each other about any laws that would be made and applied to those lived in the colony. They promised to work together to make the whole colony-thing succeed.

They used words such as “mutually” to describe how they would come together to make laws. The rules of conduct in society would be made in the presence of God and each other to “combine ourselves into a civil body politic.”

Not an uncivil body search.

It is true, the Pilgrims did “promise all due submission and obedience” to the general good of the colony.

But the key word in that philosophy is “due.”

There is nothing due or right about the broad-stroke airport security that has taken hold at the nation's airports this Thanksgiving season. It is another worthless diversion to pacify some Americans into thinking that all is well.

Further, nobody asked our permission to treat everyone the same even though a very, very, very, small and identifiable section of the traveling public is the menace.

If there is specific threat, then target those who are behind it.

What is so difficult about that?

After the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on our homeland, radical Islamists have been and still are responsible for the major threats to America.

Sunday, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQRP) is urged small-scale attacks similar to those recently attempted on cargo jets with package bombs bound for Chicago.

“The aim is to bleed the enemy to death” vowed the official AQRP magazine yesterday. The AQRP.

Not the AARP.

Or the Airline Pilots Association.

Not the NCAA or the NAACP.

The AQRP. Al-Qaida.

If 9/11 had been carried out by a cadre of platinum blonde, one-armed, retirees with tulip tattoos on their chins while they were wearing ostrich feather hats, would anyone complain about TSA strip-searching every platinum blonde, one-armed retiree with a tulip tattoo on their chin wearing an ostrich feather hat?

Reasonable people could agree that having a tulip tattoo alone might warrant further scrutiny. I'd buy that.

Myles Standish, a Mayflower passenger and military wizard of the Plymouth Colony, had it right. Standish had one job: protect his own people from hostile outside forces and insure the survival of the colony.

He was very effective in achieving security, by raiding enemy camps, killing prospective aggressors and building tall wooden walls around their small village. The fortresslike log walls featured watch towers where Pilgrim guards could keep an eye out for the bad guys.

There is no record of Myles Standish ordering guards to frisk fellow Pilgrims, search them for weapons or take their hair gel. However, when known enemies easily recognizable by their attire or appearance would approach the village, they would be welcomed with serious examination and inquiry.

A few of the rascals might not have made it back home for dinner that night.

It was the first known case of security profiling on American soil and you have to admit it was very effective.

Three hundred and ninety years later, we're still here.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie