espolson.com

First it was the loss of our civil liberties, now we jump at every little thing.

BOSTON – Several illuminated electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most of the devices depict a character giving the finger.

Once upon a time, before 9/11, this would have been a funny, sophomoric, yet clever publicity prank. Now that we’ve rolled over and bared our ever softening underbelly to the terrorists of the world this sort of thing has become criminal, an outright threat to society, and a symptom of the decline of freedom and liberty.

And to what extent was the disturbance?

Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.

The scare caused some subway service to be suspended and closed a road.

Mayor Thomas Menino said the security scare may have cost the city more than $500,000.

Wh-what? Half-a-Mill, why? Because you over reacted? Come on! When was the last time Islamic Fundamentalists or any other kind of terrorist depicted themselves as bad ‘80s video graphic cartoon characters flipping the bird. Don’t they strike you as being much too serious to be that cool?

Did your eyebrows go up like mine did when I saw this?

It [Turner Broadcasting] said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia.

They were in place two to three weeks and just now the authorities noticed them? Sheesh, that’s like smashing my thumb with a hammer on Tuesday and finally letting out the yelp on, well, two to three weeks later. What took so long to notice them? Were they not visible enough? Someone better get a hold of that ad agency and tell them their advertising isn’t catchy enough.

And then there’s this gem…

“We’re not going to let this go without looking at the further roots of how this happened to cause the panic in this city,” [Attorney General Martha] Coakley said at a news conference.

Gee, Einstein, let me help you out with that one. 9/11. That’s it. That’s all you need to know. The terrorists won. We said we weren’t going to let them, we were going to stand tall and proud and not let them change the way we live. Isn’t that what we all said? Well, we did. We turned around, bent over and grabbed our ankles. It’s a great time to be ashamed to be an american. That’s right american, not American. If you don’t believe they won you missed this one:

“Hoaxes are a tremendous burden on local law enforcement and counter-terrorism resources and there’s absolutely no place for them in a post-9/11 world,”[Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ] Knocke said.

We’ve certainly crested the slippery slope, the question remains, can we turn it around before we go the way of Greece, Rome or every other major civilization?