Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The Heirs of Liberty

Each morning, the 16,000 students in the Spring Independent School District in suburban Houston swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus. A radio frequency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and as they leave the building.

Nearly 1,000 cameras watch them all day. Every visitor — parents, volunteers, the guy who fills the Coke machine — must surrender his or her driver's license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of sex offenders. This fall, nearly one in three schools literally trap visitors inside a "secure vestibule," a bulletproof glass room, until they're checked out.
From the people who bring us "gun free schools" come conditioning camps designed to produce inmates, not sovereigns.

And remember: Our enemies hate us because we’re free.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once we fought and destroyed Nazi Germany. Now we ARE Nazi Germany. What the hell happened to us?

E. David Quammen said...

Willkommen to Stalag Amerika! Your papers bitte, snell! snell!.....

Anonymous said...

> Every visitor -- parents, volunteers, the guy who fills the Coke machine -- must surrender his or her driver's license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of sex offenders.

That "guilty until proven innocent" presumption by itself would cause me to remove my child from "public" schools.

> This fall, nearly one in three schools literally trap visitors inside a "secure vestibule," a bulletproof glass room, until they're checked out.

But, but, but.... I thought searches were legal because the visitor could turn around and leave?

Mark Odell