The awareness that there might well be more than five degrees of danger in the world, and that what is dangerous to Chicago might well not be dangerous to Tampa, is leading to increasingly fractured interpretations and views of the Department of Homeland Security's measures towards uniform terror awareness and alerts in a a space covering nearly half a continent and comprising more than a quarter of a billion widely-dispersed individuals.
In Maine, New York and New Jersey, school systems have developed plans which would take parents out of the equation entirely for protecting children in the event of a terror attack which occurs during school hours. Oregon has virtually gone overboard with it's own opportunistic anti-terror measures which dwarf the draconian federal rules, including theft, race crimes, rape, and drug-related activities as "terrorist" acts which can mandate a minimum twenty-five years in prison for the offender.
Yet in California and New Mexico, legislation has been passed which directly challenges the legitimacy of USA-PATRIOT, the latter going so far as to instruct varous state agencies from the state police to the library system to not cooperate in USA-PATRIOT investigations. And in Arizona, state director of homeland security Frank Nazarette questions the real usefulness of the nebulous, blanketing system of colour-coded terror threats, and goes so far as to suggest that he will disregard future terror alerts which do not specifically apply to potential targets in his state.
Like the back-to-back administrations of Presidents Tyler and Polk in the 1840's, the Clinton and Bush administrations have seen leaders and Congresses that first relinquished powers to the several states, and then expanded federal authority over them greatly. The resulting clash over the diversity of beliefs and values in America at the time led to a Civil War which cost more than 600,000 American lives -- more than World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnamese Conflicts combined. As states grapple with interpretation and implementation of President Bush's heavy-handed and ineffectual measures to fight a largely imagined enemy, will we be doomed to repeat history?
Phaedrus
In Maine, New York and New Jersey, school systems have developed plans which would take parents out of the equation entirely for protecting children in the event of a terror attack which occurs during school hours. Oregon has virtually gone overboard with it's own opportunistic anti-terror measures which dwarf the draconian federal rules, including theft, race crimes, rape, and drug-related activities as "terrorist" acts which can mandate a minimum twenty-five years in prison for the offender.
Yet in California and New Mexico, legislation has been passed which directly challenges the legitimacy of USA-PATRIOT, the latter going so far as to instruct varous state agencies from the state police to the library system to not cooperate in USA-PATRIOT investigations. And in Arizona, state director of homeland security Frank Nazarette questions the real usefulness of the nebulous, blanketing system of colour-coded terror threats, and goes so far as to suggest that he will disregard future terror alerts which do not specifically apply to potential targets in his state.
Like the back-to-back administrations of Presidents Tyler and Polk in the 1840's, the Clinton and Bush administrations have seen leaders and Congresses that first relinquished powers to the several states, and then expanded federal authority over them greatly. The resulting clash over the diversity of beliefs and values in America at the time led to a Civil War which cost more than 600,000 American lives -- more than World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnamese Conflicts combined. As states grapple with interpretation and implementation of President Bush's heavy-handed and ineffectual measures to fight a largely imagined enemy, will we be doomed to repeat history?
Phaedrus
