The Comments Section: A Civil War Zone For 21st Century Keyboard Warriors

          While reading articles in the New York Times, it is often possible to stumble upon the comments section. What separates the Times from other massive news agencies is that it actually takes the time to moderate its comment sections and approves comments before they actually get posted into their destined threads. This way, comments such as trolls and overzealous, overbearing self-righteous people that are undeniably rude to everyone and anyone who disagrees with them, are prevented from going on their toxic rampages. For this analysis of comments sections, one in particular was chosen, specifically, a rather frustrated comments section for an article about the TSA aptly titled, "Behind Long Airport Lines, a Chain of T.S.A. Cuts, Missteps, and Crises." It discusses the repeated mistakes made by the T.S.A. surrounding long lines, gaps in securities, personnel shortages, and budget difficulties. Seeing as civilian hatred of the T.S.A. is not only widespread (and rather valid to an extent), it is not surprising that this particular comments section is full and ablaze generally with comments against the T.S.A. and all of the injustices and inefficiencies that go on within it.

          One particular verified commenter, however, did not see this current situation as entirely the fault of mismanagement within the upper echelons of the T.S.A. He attributed a large portion the budget issues to the House GOP and the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who made it so that a portion of the money from each ticket went to the U.S. treasury instead of to the T.S.A., which caused a lack of funds, which in turn caused a decrease in the number of hired screeners. This more limited amount of personnel gave way to longer lines. He pinned this action onto the Republican party as a whole, by saying that they put their ideology before practicality This comment acknowledged that many of the problems in America's airports are caused by serial cases of poor management by senior officials, but also introduced a different viewpoint on the problem that is the T.S.A. by discussing outside factors, which in this case is the House GOP, and even more generally, the Republican party. While I may not completely agree with this statement, it is easy to understand the frustrations of this particular commenter.
          Another commenter, who appeared in the NYT picks section, This particular commenter attributed many of the problems within the TSA to the poorly designed screening process. With the lack of screeners aside, the checkpoints themselves are also terribly designed, which is also a large contributor to long, backed up lines. However, they also said that people need to also do their best to make sure they have no contraband and all of their luggage in order, so that way the lines aren't slowed down by a constant stream of people that need to be searched for detected contraband. While this point is somewhat valid, not everyone is going to be an upstanding citizen that follows all the proper procedures, which is why the TSA needs a major infrastructural overhaul. At the very least, even if the managerial staff aren't changed, an engineer should be brought in to redesign the checkpoints with efficiency in mind and to compensate for a lack of staff. Even something like a new checkpoint design could aid long lines exponentially. However, one good system set in place by the TSA is the pre-check system, which allows for faster moving lines within their own individual checkpoints, helping at least a little bit to fight outrageous line lengths.