Don't Go Into The Light
Terrorism, 24 September 2007
Memo to Boston: DO YOU NEED TO LIE DOWN FOR A BIT?
Yes. We get it. The 9/11 planes came from Beantown. GET OVER IT. Nobody there even died. Is it too much to ask that you get over this slightly faster than the Bill Buckner thing? And maybe, just maybe, not collectively shit yourselves every time a magical box produces artificial light?
As I'm sure you've read by now, Star Simpson, 19-year-old MIT student, was arrested at Logan Airport on Friday for what news reports said was walking in with a fake bomb strapped to her chest. Which is a pretty fucking serious offense and a stupid thing to do, which, of course, is why that's not actually what Star Simpson did.
What she did was to wear her hoodie to the airport to pick someone up. The hoodie had a light-up protoboard pinned to it with a nine-volt battery and some LED's in the shape of a star, for reasons which should be obvious. There are reports that she was playing with a bit of Play-Doh in one hand, leading to the "putty" allegation. We'll see if that part even turns out to be true. It was, needless to say, not a bomb. It was also not a fake bomb. It wasn't even in the shape of a Mooninite.
I would be a bit more sympathetic to the police here if Star Simpson had been, say, the tenth person they'd stopped thinking they had a bomb, and the other nine ACTUALLY HAD BOMBS. But they didn't. Nobody's ever caught anybody doing shit. So in the spirit of that sentiment, I've prepared a handy guide for Boston residents:
GOT IT?
And one more thing. Can we stop the practice of charging people with crimes whose only mistake was triggering the suspicions of a paranoid? Star Simpson was charged with disorderly conduct. Her conduct was not disorderly. Had she been left alone, she'd have picked up her boyfriend, gone back to MIT, and order would have continued to reign. She was also charged with possession of a hoax device, which is also clearly not true. We can't go around defining a "hoax" based on someone else's mistaken perception.
If you HAVE to respond to every potential threat, fine. I don't agree with it, but I understand the viewpoint even though you never actually catch anybody. But you shouldn't get to respond on a hair-trigger to every exposed wire within the city limits AND get to blame the general public for going about their business while you do it. Establish that it's not a bomb and LET THEM GO. Don't charge them to make it seem like all that shouting and gun-pointing actually resulted in a criminal facing justice.
We live in a brave new world, where electricity passing through a wide variety of substances can produce a visible glow. The sooner Boston comes to grips with this, the happier we'll all be.