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| Not necessary yet! |
A
name, a picture (probably depicting you in a bad light)? What more do you need?
BUT
THE ILLINOIS driver’s license that many of us carry about in our wallets and
tend to think of as the be-all of end-all in terms of identification in any
situation came ever so close to being inadequate for those of us who travel to
any degree of frequency.
For
Sunday was supposed to be the day that the federal government would quit
allowing people entering federal facilities to do so using an Illinois driver’s
license as their basic identification.
As
it turns out, the Federal Aviation Administration backed down, saying they’ll
extend the amount of time for Illinois to amend its license operations to make
them acceptable as proper ID until 2018.
Jan.
22 of 2018, to be exact.
AFTER
THAT DATE, if Illinois and the secretary of state’s office has not made
changes, people trying to get through airport security would not only have to
show up an hour-and-a-half prior to their scheduled flight time (then grumble
about what a massive waste of their time it is), they also would have to have a
passport.
Even
if the trip in question is just a short jaunt from O’Hare International to
Lambrecht airport in St Louis. Although personally, I can’t envision anyone
seriously making that flight – it would just be less of a hassle to drive an
automobile to get there.
Now
I’m not about to explain exactly why the Illinois license is so inadequate that
the federal government questions its legitimacy. Something about how we don’t
require enough verification measures in gathering up information about the
people we legally permit to drive automobiles on our roadways.
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| Yet another headache to be added to use of O'Hare International Airport? |
Although
the bottom line could be a factual tidbit from the Illinois Policy Institute,
which says that to fully create an Illinois driver’s license or state ID card
(for those people who don’t drive) would cost the state about $100 per license
issued – compared to the $30 it now costs.
WHICH
I’M SURE will tick off enough local people into questioning whether or not they
ever need to fly again. I can already envision the griping that would have
occurred if the federal government had maintained a hard line on this issue.
Instead,
they backed off for two years, as they have every few years for the past decade
whenever this issue comes up.
Who’s
to say when, if ever, Illinois will be in compliance with the REALID Act that
was meant to bolster the level of national security, and quite possibly be a
step toward creating a national identification card?
Which
is a step that would truly tick off the ideologues of our society who would
worry about having so much personal information in the hands of a federal
government agency.
ALTHOUGH
IF YOU think objectively about all the information that the Internal Revenue Service
or the Federal Bureau of Investigation is capable of getting about any
individual with a few strokes of computer keyboard keys, you’d have to wonder
what the real difference is.
Do
we really think more highly of Homeland Security than we do the IRS?
There’s
also the fact that in my own case, I actually have a father and step-mother who
left town for a Las Vegas weekend, and weren’t set to come back until after the
Sunday cut-off.
It
would be just my luck that they would win big at the casinos to make the family
independently wealthy, only to make it impossible for them to return to Chicago
next week. Or maybe that’s just their way of keeping the cash and telling the rest of us, “See ya!”
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