As I write this, I still can’t get over the feeling that this is out of an Orwell novel. A 16-year-old high school student in North Carolina (but of course) got more than he bargained for with his civics class project. The homework assignment required students “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights”. The unnamed student, apparently deciding to express his right to dissent, “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.” Sounds within reason, no? Well, it wasn’t for some asswipe at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart. An employee in the photo department, where the student had sent his film for processing, contacted the Secret Service, who paid a visit the kid’s school, took his poster out of the civics and eonomics classroom, and questioned the teacher. You just can’t make up this kind of fascism.
“Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room,” she says. “Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he’d never been in any trouble.”
Then they got down to his poster.
“They asked me, didn’t I think that it was suspicious,” she recalls. “I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!”
What really gets me isn’t that the idjit over at Wal-mart (who probably did this on purpose because the asswipe is a fervant supporter of The Lord Jesus Jebus King George President Bush) found it threatening, but that the Secret Service did. Surely they’ve been adeqautely trained to recognize the difference between a true threat and a kid who merely takes a picture expressing his disapproval of Bush. Is not liking the current adminstration suddenly a threat? With a 39% approval rating, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Posted on 10/10/2005 at 08:08 PM 
I’ve been very politically active, even as young as 15, which puts me at 7 years today, a lot more than most people my age. (and yes, in my area there are political organizations for high school kids) I’m going to tell you right now that just because I have a website to spread information that I think other people should be exposed to, whether they believe it or not, doesn’t make me a radical extremist, or a fundie, or a hippie, or a tree-hugger, it makes me a citizen of this country. It means that by having that website I am doing exactly what I should be doing, questioning authority. It’s our right… our RESPONSIBILITY to hold our government accountable for its actions, that’s what keeps us soverign, keeps us from tyranny. When the government no longer fears us dumb heards of sheep that need to be hearded by the elite, we are easily duped into believing whatever they tell us, and letting them strip of us everything we hold sacred all the while believing them when they say its for our own good.
You would think those boys would have something better to do? It’s time well wasted.