When I came across the following story, I had to wonder how many years we are from the day when it will be a felony to rip up the president-elect-for-life's sacred picture? And who exactly are these Secret Service agents? Do any of you out there who work for the government really think that we-the-tax-payers are paying your salary to have you chase around high school kids who express the "wrong" political viewpoints? It's stories like this that make me believe our intelligence services are a much greater threat to us than any enemy.
Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him
Matthew Rothschild
October 4, 2005
Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.
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.”
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.
But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
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.
On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”
She says the student was upset.
“He was nervous, he was scared, and his parents were out of town on business,” says Jarvis.
She, too, had to talk to the Secret Service.
“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”
Then they got down to his poster.
“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”
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.
The student was not indicted, and the Secret Service did not pursue the case further.
“I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody,” she says. “I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service.”
A person in the photo department at the Wal-Mart in Kitty Hawk said, “You have to call either the home office or the authorities to get any information about that.”
Jacquie Young, a spokesperson for Wal-Mart at company headquarters, did not provide comment within a 24-hour period.
Sharon Davenport of the Kitty Hawk Police Department said, “We just handed it over” to the Secret Service. “No investigative report was filed.”
Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, “We ertainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee.”
Jarvis uses one word to describe the whole incident: “ridiculous.”
So what do our students now learn in Civics? That they're free to express their political views but only if these views are approved by the powers-that-be.
7 comments:
Yet terrorist run amuck and the current adninistration doesn't seem to give a F&%*
Why are you surprised ? Its the job of all secret services (ever since George Orwell, Hitler, and Stalin to keep an eye on their own citizens. You never know, and need to be aware of, the enemy from within. This is what you call Homeland Security.
The good news is, America is still a long way from a tyranny. How do I know ? Because the kid is still free and alive.
Well...I won't be bringing my film to Walmart to be developed. I'm sure someone will be suspicious of all the pictures of fall follage and my cats...
Reddened leaves and cats. It sounds like a terrorist code to me.
I didn't know bin Laden had a cell in Kitty Hawk. those sharp-eyed patriots at Wall Mart, boy, do we need more of them.
Shit! somebody ought to make the clerks at the WM photo dept. read aloud to over the PA system the entire contents of Hitler's Willing Executioners. Fascism really sneaks up on countries that don't have deep enough understanding of what freedom [and its absence] really are.
What maroon came up with the idea to call it "HOMELAND Security", anyway?
I know. They could have picked something a bit flashier. Department of Defense of the Fatherland.
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