According to Patricia J Williams in her article Grim Fairy Tales she learned on NPR that "William Poole, a high school junior from Kentucky, was taken into custody and charged with threatening to commit second-degree-felony terrorism for writing a story about a horde of zombies who wreak havoc in a school. It seems the boy's grandparents had been reading his journal, found a story he'd been writing for English class and promptly turned him in. According to a police detective, "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function, it's a felony in the state of Kentucky."
If this doesn't worry you writers out there it should. With the new laws passed to "protect" you i.e., the Patriot Act and others, the government can and will arrest you for whatever they want and deem it some sort of terrorism. Poole should be protected by his first amendment rights but evidently this doesn't mean anything in Kentucky. Big Brother is closing in...
The last Williams heard, Poole was “dispatched to jail to await mercy and a sense of perspective.” Jail for writing a fictions story? Stephen King wrote a book called Rage in which a character named Charlie Decker brings a gun to school, kills a teacher, and holds students hostage. Under Kentucky law if King’s grandparent’s had found a page of this story sitting in King’s typewriter they could have reported him to authorities and he would have been jailed. Sound ridiculous? It is but something like that could happen to you for doing nothing more than writing a fiction story that someone considers “threatening.”
I've also read the GOP is working on strategy to go after the Internet next. They won't to control what you say and they will do this by passing laws to control content and will do this under the guise of protecting you from something like terrorism, identity theft, etc. People laughed at me when I said we would lose rights with this Patriot Act crap, that these laws were not so much to protect us from terrorism but to control what we say and do. Keep laughing and you will find yourself in jail for writing something on your blog that the government doesn't like.
6 comments:
This is the laest in a series of severely troubling measures taken in the name of safety.
They want us to keep guns but not to speak.
They want us to value unborn life but to kill foreigners.
They want us to be proud and afraid at the same time.
They lie.
What can be done? Aside from waiting four years for another bullshit election.
It's more than just irksome when we're bombarded with more and more rediculous guidelines that, as you seem to imply, aren't there for our protection, but for Big Brother to gain more and more control. Their focus is way out of line and they're either too dense to realize this or they're becomming so goddamn tyrannical that sooner the notion that the United States of America is a "constitution-based federal republic" will be absurd. Where are my constitutional "rights" going? To turn this boy in for an "apparent" threat to .. what? let loose a hoard of (dare i say "non-existent") zombie in his school is beyond ludicrous. How absolutely and disturbingly senseless this is is beyond description. These grandparents are the sad product of our nation (shaped by the mere words of our government) with a hiddeously distorted perception of, I'm sure, anything. And where do we possibly go from here?
We're all terrorists now.
Hey, bottle rocket.
Yea, you're right.
The next election will be just
another shuffling of the deck
chairs.
Different actors. Same crappy play.
excellent post. can't add much to what's already been said, except, yes, it can happen here.
so bloggers are going to start getting bent over and the movie industry and fictional books and any other creative genre are going to start really sucking? because of the government? time to pack up my things and buy a plane ticket to 'somewhere else'.
It would seem that with the laws regulating the first amendment freedoms in creative writing classes. They could have, and should have stopped this kid in Minn. from going on a shooting spree in his high school. If he only had written in his journal that he was going to steal his grandfathers police issue fire arm kill off granny and pappy the run down to school and kill a few more we could have stopped him.
But alas the stupidity of the "powers that be" is they are under the impression teens are predictable and want to tell us what they are doing. Teens do not want to talk to adults about what is REALLY going on because none of them want the Ward Cleaver lecture or words of wisdom. When I was a teen I would sit and think of shit to do JUST to keep them guessing. There must be some age at which adults forget what THEY did as teens. I just hope I never reach that age.
I know your commentary was about the freedom of speach but this tragedy points to the FACT that rarely, if ever, does some shooter tip thier hand in some "fictional" work for creative writing class. There is rarely any Freudian meaning of latent repressed rage for mass murder that show up in some works of fiction. Hell, did Dalhmer or Bundy write anything that would lead you to believe they were the monsters we now know them to be.
Taking away our first amendment rights will never stop little Johnny from pulling a Glock 17 or Mossberg .410 on students and teachers at his beloved school and sending them to the great beyond. Yet, if the geniuses who had this kid arrested in Kentucky were to have thier way the first amendment will be a privelege for the few who they deem worthy of these rights. All in the name of a security they will never be able to deliver on.
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