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Quality TimeOctober 10, 2005 See, I was going to write this heartwarming blog about me and Rhodry. It's been drizzling off and on all day, and besides, I have chorus rehearsal on Monday nights, which usually means no time to ride, especially if I'm buried in work. (Which I am. If the love of money is the root of all evil, then the need for money is the root of terminal exhaustion.) So I went to the barn, did chores, and then said to Rhodry, "Hey, let's go for a walk, just you and me." Before Allie joined the family, Rhodry and I went for long walks nearly every day, taking advantage of all the conservation lands that allow dogs and some that don't. In the last six years our ramblings have been limited to the places a horse can get to, which means we rarely visit Waskosim's Rock or Menemsha Hills or Cedar Tree Neck or Lambert's Cove Beach. Today we went to West Chop Woods, just outside of Vineyard Haven, and went for a brisk 30-minute hike. Well, I hiked pretty briskly. Rhodry had a lot of trees and bushes to check out, so he lagged behind. So I was going to write about that, but then I read this story about a high school student in North Carolina who got shopped to the police all because he created a poster for a class project on the Bill of Rights. The poster included a photograph that was nonviolently and nonobscenely critical of the current president of the USA. The student took the film to the local Wal-Mart to be developed. Someone in the film lab called the cops. The cops called the Secret Service. The Secret Service showed up at the boy's school, swiped his poster from a stack on his teacher's desk, and then questioned the teacher. The teacher, Selina Jarvis, said, "I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody. I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service." She summed up the incident with one word: "Ridiculous." Got that right. But scary too. I think it's pretty scary when not one person, from the Wal-Mart photo lab to the local police to the Secret Service, had the intelligence to apply the brakes to this little chain reaction. Not one person said, "Huh? How likely is it that the guy who made this poster is a threat to national security?" If the emperor marched down the street stark nekkid, they'd all be oohing and ahhing about the silks, the satins, the exquisite ermine cloak. For Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore interviewed a middle-aged fellow who'd been shopped to the FBI by guys he was working out with at the gym, because he'd said something critical about the Bush administration. You gotta wonder. You really gotta wonder. "And it's 1-2-3, what are we fighting for?" The whole story's at http://www.alternet.org/walmart/26503/. Read it and weep, or gnash your teeth, or make yourself a WHEN IN DOUBT TURN LEFT T-shirt.
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