Underwear, books do not make a terrorist

OFF/BEAT GLIDEWELL E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published July 30, 2002

It was a few years ago now, so I can write about it without getting anyone in trouble.

It all began with a certified letter.

I was lying on my living room floor watching television one afternoon when there was a knock at the front door. Because everyone I know uses the rear door to enter and leave my house, knocks on the front door tend to be either official or from people eager to share their religious beliefs.

Either way, I am usually in my underwear. Most of the Jehovah's Witnesses in my neighborhood think I am deformed because I always stand behind the door and lean sideways long enough to thank them for sharing and to tell them I am not interested.

This day it was a postal worker with a certified letter. I remained behind the door, signed the receipt and handed it back to her.

Dade City is a small town. By the time the story got to her co-workers and one of them who was a neighbor of one of my co-workers retold it, I had come to the door in an unselfconscious display of full frontal nudity. I wasn't bothered by that a lot, but I felt a little betrayed.

And if the Department of Justice had gotten its "Operation TIPS" program (TIPS stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System) through the House of Representatives' version of the Homeland Security Bill (It probably won't be in the Senate version) I would feel even more betrayed.

Basically, although supporters of the bill deny it, the government wanted to enlist postal workers, delivery people, truck drivers, and millions of other workers to report "suspicious and terrorist related activity."

The semantics here bother me.

Isn't any terrorist-related activity, by definition, suspicious?

So why "suspicious and terrorist related."

That puts the job of deciding what is suspicious in the hands of the person doing the reporting.

There are people who would consider my choices of art, literature and videos "suspicious," because of their religious or social beliefs. I own copies of The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, which would have been enough to bring FBI interest in the 1950s. I also own copies of 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World, which was enough to get me in trouble in the Miami School system in the early 1960s.

What's that, you say? The McCarthyite 1950s and the days of the mid-1960s gay- and liberal-bashing Johns Committee of the Florida Legislature are gone?

Gone maybe, but not forgotten.

People get suspicious about a lot of things, most of them having nothing to do with terrorism or any other illegal activity.

The extent to which I want them invited by my government to spy on me is limited.

Very limited.

My house is routinely visited by representatives of a pest control company and by a house cleaner when I am not home. It is also visited by telephone, cable television and air conditioner repair and maintenance persons. All of whom I expect to do the jobs they are trained to do, and not the job of police who, at the very least, are aware of laws regarding privacy and unlawful search and seizure and who are trained to differentiate between illegal conduct and unpopular conduct.

I expect any citizen who sees obviously criminal activity, mine or anyone else's, to call the police. I also expect them to already know that that is their responsibility without being enlisted in the rat-out-your-neighbors-and-customers force.

I heard comedian Robin Williams the other night voice a thought that a lot of us have had even if we haven't said it out loud. He was speculating on the uneasy similarity between the terms "Homeland," as used today and "Fatherland," as used in 1930s and 1940s Germany.

And I read a quote recently from Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge saying, "There's a big difference between being vigilant and being a vigilante."

I'd like to think that he and others in the administration know the difference in both cases.

I really would.

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