This is what happens when everyone is afraid of everyone else:
His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana.
But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious — perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration — and taken a picture of him as he slept.
How paranoid must we be for a passenger on an airplane to go to the trouble of taking a picture of someone while they sleep so as to make it easier to report him to the authorities?! Would you do this? Could you ever see yourself doing this? I know I couldn’t.
Once we start reporting one another for “suspicious activity,” we’re doomed. Neighbors who don’t get along will be reporting each other for fictions and imagined crimes, and the system will be abused for personal gain. After all, if you can just call a number and say “so-and-so acted weird, I suspect he’s a terrorist” and have that person arrested – I mean, c’mon people! We’re one step away from a loud knock in the middle of the night and lots of scary looking men in black jackets land here!
And if I hear one person say “we need to be like this, people are out to kill us, it’s a strange new world after 9/11,” I will say BULL. There is a fine line between healthy suspicion and rampant paranoia, and I am telling you – this is the latter, not the former.
Now that this gentleman has been (wrongly) accused, how does he clear his good name? How does he get himself off the “extra screening” list? How can he stop the harassment? He was not charged of anything, he turned out to be completely harmless. So where is his recourse?
Unlike being arrested for a “normal” crime, he has no recourse. There is no court that can seal his records (or remove them completely). He has no one to appeal to. The system is secret and allows for no questioning of its inner workings. It is a system designed to quash any opposition. If you don’t like it, be careful about saying so – you’ll end up on the list and endlessly harassed every time you exercise your right to travel. The system is designed to “bully” people into submission. You dare not speak up for fear of the inconvenience it’ll cause you.
Which, coincidentally, brings to mind the story of a bunch of people who got fed up with the same sort of thing – a system designed to “bully” them into submission. Every time they complained, the system just squeezed them harder, hoping that they’d just roll over and accept domination.
Fortunately for us, those people didn’t roll over. They were the founding fathers of the United States of America, and they stood up to this sort of harassment, bullying, and removal of their inalienable rights.
We could all do well to learn – or re-learn – from their example in these troubling times.
