Friday, February 02, 2007

Everybody PANIC!

Congratulations, fearmongers. Your years of manipulating the American public, trying to get us to actually believe that any one of us could at any moment be the victim of a terrorist attack on our way to the grocery store, has yielded its most startling dividends yet.

You have succeeded in making the citizens of the generally quite jaded city of Boston terrified of Lite-Brites.

I'd laugh at the absurdity of this recent news story, but it's just too alarming to be funny. Two guys have been arrested and charged with serious crimes for doing something that is, but for a trivial bit of technology we encourage children to play with, essentially the same thing any Joe Citizen does when he tapes signs for his garage sale on the lamp post at the nearby intersection.

How wound up and cowed do we as a nation have to be to have this kind of overreaction?

4 comments:

Roland Deschain said...

I heard about this. Hell this was on a BILLBOARD in LoDo for a month. I even read an editorial from a New York newspaper which basically called Bostonians a bunch of wusses - there were over 80 of them in NYC for over a month and nobody panicked or called the bomb squad.

And now Boston wants reimbursed for "disarming" these? Maybe if our government had half a wit, they'd do what these enterprising folks on Ebay are doing - and SELLING THEM.
For over $600.
God help us all.
http://cgi.ebay.com/aqua-BOSTON-teen-BOMB-SCARE-hunger-LED-SIGN-force-ATHF_W0QQitemZ140081894451QQihZ004QQcategoryZ363QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Brad said...

I've talked to a few people about this and i think they all agree with the New York paper that roland pointed out - Boston is full of wussies.

Do you know what the cops in NYC and Seatle did? They just picked them up and put them in the dumpster.

Anonymous said...

I love the "CSI gloves" used in the photo you picked. this whole thing is just as funny as the show it's based on. (which, if you haven't seen it, is very funny.)

if they actually give those advertising dudes real criminal convictions for this silly thing, it will be a pivotal moment in American history where we can point to and say "this is the moment the fear mongers went totally nuts"

the mole

GiromiDe said...

The press conference is the most telling moment so far. The press conference never leads to anything more than "no comment," so the two guys basically went out of their way to piss off a group of people who played a part in spreading fear.