Matt Rothschild over at the Progressive website has another one of those stories that just makes you want to yell – but not too loud, someone might hear and report you:
On September 20, the Secret Service paid a call to Selena Jarvis, a high school social studies teacher in North Carolina, to discuss a poster one of her students had made illustrating the right to dissent. Details below the fold…
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
The student’s made a critical error in his plot against Amurka, however: He had the photos developed at Wal-Mart, where a loyal patriot dropped the dime (boy, I’m dating myself there! What phrase is used today?) on him:
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.
The Secret Service came to call, took the child’s poster from the room (unknown by the teacher), questioned the boy, and then questioned the teacher:
“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!” [You gotta LOVE that comeback!! – KP]
At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident “would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted,” she says.
No one was indicted, of course; just another day of erosion of our constitutional freedoms in Amurka.
Didn’t we spend 40 years fighting the cold war – including Korea and Vietnam – because we didn’t believe in this kind of thing? WTF!?!?
