Government Instilled Paranoia

[catscradle]

Well, today I was late for work. Why you ask? Well, I took the bus. Now, normally when I take the bus I"m about 20 minutes early, which is cool because I can then get breakfast and bring it into the office. It's a little ritual I do every Tuesday and Thursday.

Not today. Today the people at the lightrail station send in police officers to check everyone's ids. Now, if they were checking to see bus passes or tickets I can see that. But the officer asked me for a photo id - any id with a picture at all, not just a license or school id - they didn't care about my pass to get on the train. While we were waiting to get checked, everyone missed their train.

So now that I'm at work I called the RTD station and asked what the hell was going on. I was then informed that they've been doing spot checks on people ever since September 11th. Now tell me, what the hell good is checking photo ids to prevent terrorism at a bus station? It isn't a difficult task to get a little card with your picture and your name on it here. And if the terrorism is domestic those kind of checks are completely moot.

But doing that kind of check is effective. It instills a sense of fear in the people - the type of fear needed to continue citizen support for our boarderless open-ended war on "terrorism".

Next election, vote Green.

No Justice

Comments

huh...

[babaca.livejournal.com]

I would have thought they were doing checks for that nutjob who was mailing pipebombs everywhere.

Re: huh...

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

Well, when I called them they claimed it was due to September 11th - but even if it was because of the pipe bombs - the kid is American and they knew it was domestic since the first bomb was found. A pipe bomber would have a valid id. Checking those wouldn't stop anything. Except people trying to get to work on time.

I'm bitter, can you tell?