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| Camera! Action! |
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| Er, but not on me, okay? |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 10, 1999. There are many sure pieces of evidence that America, for all its charms, must be the most hypocritical nation on earth, dethroning even the French. One does not need to squint far. Here in Boulder the Damned, as in much of the state, a new law makes it possible for a electronically activated camera to photograph both car and driver speeding down a street, or running a red light, and stamping the evidence with time and date and appearing in court at the appropriate time to send the offender off to the clink. Here, one would think, is the weapon to nail all those horrid, horrid people who run stop signs around elementary schools. Here is the tool to nail drunk drivers as they themselves tool down our metropolitan streets. Here is the key to getting all those selfish people off the road and allowing the good people, the salt of the earth, the parents concerned with the children, the forces of good, to drive safely about our legal and peaceful business. You would think the citizenry would be glad and welcome this sure technique to pacify the unruly. And you would be wrong. It turns out that an interestingly large proportion of mothers and fa-thers are the ones speeding up to schools by a series of motions kindly called rolling stops to deposit and pick up the children we so love. It turns out that many of those drivers we thought were drunk were simply carrying on pointless conversations over a car phone and not paying attention. We now know that most speeders on city streets are not drunks or immigrant kids high on meth, but the button-downed insurance salesmen and their wives on their some urgent mission to the store, church, gym, liquor store, or bail bondsman. Technology is wonderful, but only if it reinforces our prejudices. When it turns on us, clearly it is a state conspiracy to infringe on our rights. We - or at least you - are the good people. Bad drivers, drunk drivers, disconnected drivers, are the bad people - the others. The cameras were to prove that. They did anything but. We met the dan-gers on the street and they were you. I don't have a car, bucko.Far from admitting the truth, Boulder's citizens have gone ballistic. Open any of our unread-able newspapers, flense through the ads for the cash heavy businesses clearly laundering drug money to the Screed to the Editor columns, and they are full of indignant complaints about the unfairness of a camera devoid of emotion or inclination to wink at decades-old behavior. The cameras are inaccurate, it seems. The police manning them are untrained and unskilled. I was not speeding, and can I argue the points down, your Honor? This is a violation of my rights! No welfare queen constructed by Reagan's febrile lucubrations is more the greedy deadbeat than the Boulder business executive inflamed that his mere ten miles an hour over the residential speed limit, in aggregate with his speeding tickets in Florida last year, now puts his license in jeopardy. He lives in that neighborhood, damn it, and he - being a father - wouldn't do anything to endanger the lives of his neighbor's children. He himself is a father. Not buying that, your honor? Okay, my $175 an hour lawyer and his experts can prove that on this particular occasion, the police van was waving in the wind and gave an incorrect reading. That's right. No go? Look, this is the invasion of Big Brother, and this is so very different than the security cameras I had my company install in the employee locker-room. We're trying to figure out who is stealing toilet paper - theft! - from our business. This camera is just trying to break down the, the, the spirit of freedom so dear to all Americans, your honor. And they are not totally wrong here. There is something icky about cameras on every street corner to catch speeders, on every kiosk to find out who is defacing or burning posters. On every computer chip to discover what machines visit what web sites. But we deserve the cameras because we won't admit our own behavior, nor will we accept the responsibility for acting correctly. We won't confront our loudmouthed neighbor, our own spouse for being an unsafe and selfish driver. We won't confront people likely to carry grudges about being turned in for petty arson in front of our store. We don't want to admit we visit bi-sexual llama sites on the Internet or pedophile sites and therefore Microsoft's specific number for each Windows98, recently revealed and currently being recalled, is a violation of our rights but not the rights of actual pedophiles. I suppose in a nation so uninformed about the responsibilities of citizenship that we should not be appalled that the only people worried about losing the First Amendment are potheads scared about losing their fix and hiding behind economic arguments to allow hemp farming. The only people worried about losing privacy are those trying to crawl out from under a provable violation of speeding laws. The only people who care about recycling are those who are employed by it or get tax relief for it. And all of them invoke children and the future. We are a nation - we are a city - of selfish hypocrites. |
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