I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to leave Mediagirl’s blogging on cloture and what it means to constituents as versus the politicians. Nor do I want to leave the subject of Giuliana Sgrena (Nur al-Cubicle has up a translation of an interview of her by Marco Imarisio of Il Corriere dell Sera). I want to talk about Georgia’s redistricting and the State Senate’s Democratic caucus which “led by the chamber’s black members, walked out of the Legislature Friday after an emotional vote on voting rights“. Plus I’ve Idyllopus Adventures in Blogging Film reviews that I have lined up brain and deskwise to do. Then there’s always the War on Terrorism and who’s terrorizing who.
I’ve also been found by gambling spammers hitting the comments area and need to do something about that.
But for now I will write on the killing of Court Judge Rowand Barnes here on Friday. What happened is horrible. I hope that someone doesn’t take advantage and decide that this means all defendants will have to wear handcuffs in court and their jail garb (Nichols had his handcuffs removed so he could change clothes when he stole the deputy’s gun). But what struck me was that in a city of several million people, in response to the shooter (okay, alleged shooter) being on the loose, they locked down a number of the county’s public schools and provided extra security for a sports game that night to help ease the nerves of jittery Atlantans.
As a precaution, authorities also ordered 35 schools in the city’s public school system locked down as police searched for the escaped gunman. Police helicopters hovered over the city, crisscrossing paths with television news choppers.
The school district’s security chief considered what neighborhoods the gunman might approach and locked down specific schools accordingly, a school system spokesman said.
Less than five schools remained on lock-down early Friday afternoon. Some suburban private schools were also on lock-down.
My husband’s mother called from east Georgia to tell my husband not to drive that night. Which means that a couple of hundred miles away the media was inciting hysteria and I guess leading all to believe the city of Atlanta was under siege by Nichols, and as Nichols had a car then the whole of Georgia and possibly the entire southeast was under siege. I didn’t watch the news that day and so don’t know if the media outlets were pursuing this tack, I haven’t watched the news in years because I don’t trust it and usually the news isn’t newsworthy instead it’s about “Jack Sprat won’t eat fat!” in Alaska, you get the picture, something anything to do with oddball comedy or tragedy that doesn’t usually want the concern of anyone out of a tight family circle or a radius of 30 to 50 miles.
Marveling at the lock-down of the schools and a whole stadium of thousands requiring extra security, I remembered a word I’d been searching for several days ago when I made mention of the Patriot Act here. When it was voted through, in response to my horror over the Act, some people called me “alarmist”. I couldn’t remember what the word was the other day. But I did on Friday.
Alarmist.
I was alarmist over the Patriot Act that effects us all. I’m alarmist over just about everything (probably everything) the Bush Administration does or seeks to do.
But it isn’t alarmist, in response to an escaped convict being on the loose in a city of several million people, to lock down the county’s schools, to provide extra security to the thousands at a sports game?
When I was in junior high we had a lock-down because of an escaped prisoner, a serial killer who had targeted the neighborhood my family happened to live in so that there were several women killed within a relatively small area, including on the street over from us and streets on which friends lived. The killer happened to have lived just a few houses from the junior high and his family still did. There was fear the escaped convict would head for the area and thus the lock-down.
That situation is not the same as locking down the schools in an entire county in response to an escaped convict.
Americans seem to be in a state of perpetual terror about all the wrong things. Most of the things they’re afraid of have nothing to do with them or relatively little chance of touching their lives. It’s this same fear that has been exploited in the “War on Terror”, which both Republicans and Democrats have used to mangle constitutional rights and convince of the must of domestic and global protectorate Big Brother.
I do a Google search looking for what counties were locked down (because I thought I’d remembered two counties being involved from Friday’s news) and find enough time has passed for Infowars.com to be indexed with its cry of “Foul!”.
As usual, the Police State has taken full advantage of a crisis to further condition Americans for martial law. After today’s courthouse shooting in Atlanta several schools where put on lock-down, despite the killer’s vengeance being obviously focused on those involved with his current trail.So, a gunman on the loose after shooting a judge and two others at the courthouse prompts several schools to put children on “lock-down.” What this does is condition the public for martial law and to accept that children can and will be treated like prisoners at the Police State’s discretion.
For those parents who might be feeling some misguided sense of security from this martial law practice, remember that in March of 2003 we reported that in the event of a Red Alert not only would all Americans be under house arrest, but parents would not be allowed to pick up their children from school.
That means that the Police State reserves the right to complete control of your children, and, just as the Patriot Act has been used as a vehicle to arrest many people for non-terrorist crimes, the quick lock-down of schools over this incident can be seen as a first, hysterical push initiating a long slide down a slippery slope towards a total lock-down society where the entire country is a prison.
The stadium in question was the Georgia Dome, seating 70,000, the games being the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament. OK, I can understand beefing up security downtown, but what I’m talking about was the banquet of hysteria offered the masses. The kind that has your husband’s mother calling from east Georgia to make sure you don’t go out driving that night.
Nichols had incredible radar. After escaping the Courthouse one of the cars he carjacked belonged to a reporter and another to a person who worked at the AJC and killed a federal agent who wasn’t part of the manhunt.
His initial victims were Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Deputy Sgt. Hoyt Teasley. He shot Deputy Cynthia Ann Hall (from whom he stole the gun) but she survived. He carjacked a tow truck driver. At a parking garage he carjacked Don O’Brian, AJC reporter, who was on his way to work. He escaped. He carjacked Almeta Kilgo, a computer programmer at the AJC. She got away. He assaulted a couple in Buckhead. Somehow or other he ended up killing that night a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, David Wilhelm, who last spoke with his wife at 8:30 p.m. After that he apparently then took a woman hostage and held her for a while at an apartment complex before releasing her, which is when she called 911 and he was caught.
Officers chased Nichols into one parking garage, but they didn’t block the exit and he escaped. Police didn’t set up checkpoints in the two MARTA stations within four blocks of where Nichols was last spotted. And they didn’t immediately concentrate on searching for him in the Buckhead area, even after a couple said they thought it was Nichols who had assaulted them.
Considering the mistakes made by the police, maybe the schools should have been in lock-down. Am just saying it first before someone sites it in the comment area.
Still, what I’m considering is the undercurrent and what directs that undercurrent. Nothing is explicitly “war on terror” and furtherance of Big Brother related here. The media was doing what it’s been doing for years. But the undercurrent feels to me influenced by agenda, and the situation, though totally unrelated to the War on Terror, is yet another that plays on the public’s sense of heightened insecurity in respect to events that have nothing to do with them, such events then referenced unconsciously and contributing to the idea that Big Brother protections and loss in freedom are essential.
When people a couple of hundred miles away call and suggest personal curfew or lock-down to friends or relatives who live in the general area of an occurrence that has nothing to do with them, in a city of millions, then you know you’re going down the right street with your terror campaign. If people do that they’re willing for a police state to oversee every aspect of their lives. And they don’t see how they’re being anything but concerned and cautious.
If our relatives were calling, one can imagine how many other people in Atlanta and Georgia and probably Tennessee and Alabama were getting similar phone calls.
The Bankruptcy Reform Act flies through without a hitch, a threat to most everyone, to millions of people, but no one phoned me to beware. No one phoned to say if you don’t have a photo ID you can’t vote now (which translates into if you don’t have your National ID .
Not even the gun lobbyists have been able to do anything about the National ID card.
Oh, that’s right, we’re not supposed to call it a National ID card, which means it must not be. Instead it’s Real ID. As in anything else is bogus. Trust not anything but Real ID.
Don’t leave home without it.
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