Slipping on the Slope

Montgomery County School Board President Patricia O'Neill
Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Jerry Weast

Dear Patricia and Jerry:

I was excited to read in this morning's (Aigist 25) extra section of the Post that you have decided to put cameras into school buses to stop bullying and other problems. Hurray!

I know that people throughout Montgomery County and the state of Maryland will be excited to learn that you have come up with such an innovative way of stopping transgressions amongst our youth. I do hope that you will soon realize that classrooms, schoolyards, even malls and other venues in our community are also problem areas for young people and should be monitored. Indeed, with recent violent incidents in our community (like those at the Westfield mall in Wheaton), I strongly encourage you to place cameras liberally in our parks and other public locations.

Indeed, why stop with school buses? What about protecting passengers, drivers, and others from disturbances that start on Ride-on buses, Metro cars, sports facilities, bars, banks, stores, streets, and other hotbeds of unrest? Surely you should suggest to the County Executive that video cameras would help crib intimidation, theft, violence, and harassment in these locations. Let's put video cameras everywhere a problem might occur.

Of course there will be pesky believers in civil liberties and privacy who will worry about the creep of cameras into their lives. I'm sure that you can wave away any concerns residents may have about the slippery slope toward state control you're sliding on, after all, Dr. Weast indicated in the Post article indicated that school officials are mindful of trampling personal rights.

Well, as long as you're mindful, bring on the cameras!

Yours truly,

Mo Tonguincheek

Shamelessly Excerpted From Chainmail

particularly notable in DC...

SEAGULL MANAGER:
A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then
leaves.

ADMINISPHERE:
The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file.
Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly
inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

SALMON DAY:
The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get
screwed and die in the end

Not lunacy

Frolics of the intuition, artistic vision, inspiration, all the grand things which have lent my life such beauty, may, I expect, strike the layman, clever though he be, as the preface of mild lunacy.

From Vladimir Nabokov's book Despair