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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, March 3, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Big Brother is watching us Here's a story for our times: an American citizen is confronted by police officers, guns drawn, in New York City. She is handcuffed and taken into custody where she is detained and questioned for several hours. Ultimately she is released. Her crime? Doodling. On her school desk. The would-be felon is Alexa Gonzalez, a 12year-old elementary school student. She had written - in erasable ink - "I LOVE MY FRIENDS ABBY AND FAITH." She then signed it: "LEX WAS HERE, 2/1/10." Police??? Handcuffs???? School officials later allowed that perhaps Alexa's arrest was a mistake. "Based on what we've seen so far," said a school official, "this shouldn't have happened." Well, duh. We live in paranoid times. The same newspaper that carried the tale of Alexa's run-in with the Keystone Kops in New York ran a story of a similar happening a little closer to home. That story concerned the mass evacuation of a public school in Saanich, north of Victoria, B.C. Not so surprising, really. Saanich lies on the dreaded fault line, along which seismologists assure us a major earthquake will occur sooner or later. Perhaps a tremor had shivered through the school auditorium? Or maybe there'd been a cougar sighting? Or a serial killer alert? Nope. What triggered the mass evacuation of students was a note discovered in a girls' washroom which contained "threatening language." Classes were suspended, school buses were summoned, students and faculty took the rest of the day off, while a full police investigation was launched. Over a piece of paper in a girls' washroom. Times change. I remember back in my public school days when a fellow student named Ivan "went postal." Ivan was a tough cookie even in Grade Eight and he had a lot of energy to burn off. On this particular day he chose to chill out by punching out the lower windows in one of the school portables. He was pretty good at it. I think he did twelve or thirteen before Mr. Creighton, the shop teacher, grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him off to the school nurse. Schools handled "threats" differently then. The nurse stitched Ivan up, the principal kicked him out of school; his parents got a bill for the broken windows and the rest of us didn't even get the afternoon off. I can't imagine what might happen to Ivan if he tried that stunt today - particularly if he chose an airport in which to "act out." Consider the case of Jules Paul Bouloute. Mister Bouloute is a 57-year-old Haitian who had just come from his devastated homeland, landed at Kennedy Airport and, in the noise and confusion, not to mention signage in a foreign language, made the mistake of a lifetime. Mister Bouloute attempted to go through the wrong door. It was only an emergency exit which would have put Mister Bouloute back on the tarmac but the airport officials responded as if the man's underpants had exploded. Sirens whooped, alarms blared, security staff scrambled and deployed, and Mister Bouloute was, of course, arrested. He's lucky he wasn't tasered into a crispy critter. That can happen at airports these days. Well, perhaps not so lucky. Mister Bouloute was tackled and shackled, then arraigned on charges of first-degree criminal tampering and thirddegree criminal trespass. He faces, as of this writing, up to seven years in prison. Can't you hear the conversation in the prison exercise yard? "What you in for, man?" "Murder." "Bank job." "Assault with a weapon." "How about you, buddy?" "Um, I tried to go through the wrong door..." As a not-unrelated aside, I got an email from my old pal Krieno this week. Krieno and I went to journalism school together many moons ago. "Do you recall," he wrote, "when we carefully stuck a lit cigarette onto the fuse of a cherry bomb*, placed it in a locker outside the cafeteria, then retired to our favourite lunch table to await the inevitable outcome? The explosion bent the locker door and happened, as luck would have it, at the exact moment the dean of journalism walked by with a delegation of visitors. Today, such a stunt would undoubtedly bring the full force of the law streaming onto the campus... and we'd be doing six-to-ten on a terrorism charge." Indeed. We might even be sharing a cell with Monsieur Bouloute. (*cherry bomb: a sort of firecracker on steroids)