Coward Culture

We’ve long been a society of wimps and braggarts, but it’s reached epidemic proportions lately. It’s been a long time since the world trembled when this nation roared; sure, we’ve still got lots of military hardware and ordinance and we can definitely cause a whole lot of problems for anybody we’re annoyed at, but our voice is falling on deaf ears a lot lately on the world stage.

This is an example of why. A man walked into an emergency room holding an envelope, apparently did or said something that spooked somebody, and the police were called. The man was arrested, his envelope “seized” and analyzed by the bomb squad, and the emergency room was shut down entirely — no one let in or out (except for what the hospital calls “Level-One trauma patients”) — for hours until the envelope was deemed to be harmless. Traffic around the hospital was also halted, which meant a disruption in city traffic for the area. This took place in the evening hours, but that didn’t speed up the process at all.

The news article tells a more “serious” story — the envelope is described as “over-stuffed,” and the man is said to have been called “mentally ill” by the police officers involved. It is stated that the envelope made a metal detector beep when it was tested by officers.

So … a non-event. Dozens of personnel and patients were needlessly upset and bothered by this nonsense, and traffic for an entire city block surrounding this hospital was disrupted for hours, all because a guy, presumably in a bad mood, walked into a hospital with an envelope that had just enough metal in it to make a hyper-sensitive metal detector beep, and said something unpleasant to somebody. There’s absolutely no detail in the article, and depressingly, the reporter involved seemed not to ask any important questions…

Just who was this man, and what was the nature of his dispute or complaint? If we knew who he was, or why he was there, we could dig a little deeper to get a better picture of what really happened here.
- Maybe he had a billing dispute with the hospital (demanding money from me that I don’t owe really pisses me off; presumably it would upset most anybody).
- Maybe he was genuinely ill or felt bad (I’m in a pretty foul mood if I feel sick … pain sucks).
- Perhaps he was looking for someone he knew, who had been admitted to the hospital or was being treated by the ER.
What was actually in the envelope? If we knew the contents of this “threatening” over-stuffed envelope, we could again understand better what really happened.
- Maybe he had just received a bill from the hospital. Have you ever seen a billing statement from an emergency room? Just folding a tome like that into thirds to fit in a standard Common #10 envelope would be enough to make it bulge. I bet the staple or paper clip holding that bundle together would be enough metal to set off an overzealous metal detector, too.
- Perhaps it was assorted (and unrelated to his visit) paperwork, again held together by staples or paper clips, and he just happened to have it in his hand when the situation “escalated” in the hospital.
- What if it was just harmless paperwork and a stray credit card? Or a bunch of change?
Who actually contacted police? This is another important piece that’s missing.
- A paranoid, frightened intern?
- A grumpy billing bureaucrat, getting tired of answering lots of “pesky” questions from a debtor?
- A trigger-happy security grunt, bored out of his mind halfway through his shift?
- A front-desk triage nurse who wanted a break?
Why was the bomb squad involved in this? The waste of thousands of tax dollars on this exercise is not adequately explained in this article, either.
- Common sense dictates it is very hard to construct something dangerous in such a small, confined space (fitting into a Common #10 envelope, which doesn’t really “stretch” that much even when it’s “over-stuffed”). It’s not enough physical space to store a “useful” amount of explosives (you’d have a big firecracker at best), and if it were carrying a biological agent of some sort, it wouldn’t need to be “over-stuffed.”
- How was this envelope presented as a threat credible enough to warrant calling a bomb squad in the first place?

Why do I seem so cynical in my evaluation of this situation? It’s primarily because they’ve already owned up to the fact that the envelope and its contents were not dangerous. It’s also because although the man was taken into police custody and has been “questioned,” there’s no mention of an actual arrest or of any charges being filed at all. That’s a classic “stop screwing with us, or we’ll make your life hell” tactic — give someone a “taste” of the legal system without causing any lasting harm (beyond inconvenience) and maybe they’ll stop hassling you, even if they’re right.

I’m also really cynical about this because of just how little effort it apparently takes to whip a hospital emergency room into a “bomb scare” panic — walk in with a bad attitude and a stuffed envelope (that’s got enough metal in it to set off a metal detector) and you’ll have yourself a shiny new “police action” on your hands. Ugh.

We’re a nation of pussies if this is all it takes to “scare” us now. Did no one at the scene stop to suggest “uh, guys, it’s just a bunch of fucking paperwork”? Did no one stop long enough to ask “hey, are we really thinking this is an actual bomb?”

What about after it was revealed to be harmless? Did the man at least have the chance to say “I told you, you stupid bastards, this was just paperwork!” Will he have recourse against these people for falsely accusing him of being a terrorist (hey — if they get to throw hyperbole around, so do we Smiling )?