An End To Playing Hooky
Three years ago I posted this paranoid little screed about how "protecting the children" was the most popular trojan horse for ill-advised incursions into civil liberties ever devised, due to the fact that no matter how Orwellian and insane an idea may be on the face of it, ultimately very few people are willing to publicly argue against keeping children safe from harm. I speculated that the school districts requiring kids to carry GPS-chipped ID cards ("for their own protection") looked like the leading wedge of other more intrusive measures.
By way of saying "I told you so,"* please enjoy this story, about how the city of San Antonio Texas is now using the ankle bracelets commonly associated with house arrests to prevent truancy.
Besides performing the obvious function of keeping problem students from skipping school or thinking for a second that Big Brother doesn't know exactly where they are and what they're up to at all times, this program has the added advantage of getting these troubled youths used to being treated like the hardened criminals they will no doubt one day become. This, accompanied by the random searches and urine tests to which junior high school students have become accustomed over the last decade, will go a long way towards ensuring their compliance in the great walled-in Safety State of our glorious future, a world in which all Americans, young and old alike, will be perfectly safe forever just as our Founding Fathers intended.
Texas: leading the way to our safe, free, not-at-all dystopian future!
Posted by flamingbanjo at August 23, 2008 02:25 PMI suppose it's really too late, but can't we just encourage Texas to secede and go back to being a Republic, or whatever they were before statehood?
Posted by: COMTE at August 25, 2008 10:11 AMComte: I think their current plan is to secede and take us all with them.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at August 25, 2008 11:50 AM