A Minor Alert
The University of Maryland College Park had its own private Terror alert the other day - last Tuesday. It didn't seem to be a big deal, and didn't get a lot of press, but all experience and phenomenon is instructive. They invited the county and state police in to assist the campus police to all check vehicles coming on campus that morning and then lurked about through the day. So people tell me. I actually didn't notice and heard about it on the evening news that night. The Baltimore Sun carried a short and cryptic story about it the next day College Park campus put on 1-day alert. The People who had driven cars on campus early Tuesday then had their first and only bit of information as to what that had been about. Unspecific information from the Dept. of Homeland Security about a specific threat during a specific time period. I didn't care and the writing on the (broadside) wall seemed to indicate we weren't going to hear much else. My immediate supervisor, a senior level clerk, wasn't about to let it go. Newspapers, press releases and official statements, are fine but the institution of the university puts a more powerful medium in her hands, the Prince Georges county old-girls network. She calls up the Dean of Libraries' secretary another PG native, and tells her she "needs to know". Sometime later a spokes women for the campus police calls her as a curtsy and says essentially 'we tell you about all the robberies and assaults on campus that should be good enough for you. We are not telling you about national security matters and have said all we are going to say about this" .
My supervisor experienced a period of cognitive dissonance in the wake of this call akin to a spell of vertigo. She grasped at the usual round of work place issues that usually gets a rise out of people here: worker health, safety, welfare, diversity, team based. I'm not saying that anything gets done when these are invoked, but they usually send folk scurrying about to create the appereance that something is/will be done - moving the cheese back into place. The women on the phone had sounded very firm. Firmer than these gossomers of modern management, firmer than 20 years time-in-grade. Firm and dismissive. What about the Patriot Act?, my supervior asked (rhetorically about 20 minutes later). She had the idea the purpose of the patriot act was to empower citizenry, explain the terror threat to them, inform them like a personal briefing, provide channels of information to the people (if ever desired) so that they may be better armed in the struggle. Why else would such a thing exist?
That's not exactly how it works I told her.
Call this the Ashcroft effect. They enact a police state bushel of measures, and we get Stasi attitudes from the merest law enforcement, trucker junior G-men, and blank faced dismissals of request for public financed information
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Bid for information on lobbyists denied (via Metafilter). If there are any phantoms of lost liberty floating around they're off haunting someone else, some semi-loyal citizen with a compromised conscience. People like my supervisor sleepwalk acceptingly through all this, because they believe that 'we' and our choosen 'us' will always be inside the fold and "in-the-loop". So the fight against the bad guys, the evil terror, can proceed by any, and all, means neccesary. If people had a better idea of what is being given up, they might not be so free to let it go. They might ask: what changes, and who benefits?
11:18:02 PM  ;;
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