Welcome to Colorado

[sigma7]

In case you missed it, opheliasclone called me on the last Katrina-related gobbledygook to appear here, and you know, rightly so. My own personal fact-checking habits are approximately nil now. It's a mixture of a lot of things, from my own pessimism and despair and utter inability to be surprised by aspects of an Orwellian future gradually being embraced by the present to the fact that I think I have the cognitive skills of a turnip quiche (ask motteditor about my fantasy football draft skills and why we're going into Week 1 using a little-known "all-prevent" "linemen? we don't need no stinkin' linemen!" defense). I just don't think I can be surprised anymore.

That said, there's been a lot of content on Boing Boing I've propagated here, mainly because I thought it was worth reading -- opheliasclone sniffed out one that seems quite likely to have at least been significantly affected and altered by the tinfoil-hat perspective. And my bad for the lack of scrutiny. I'll try to be a little more perceptive and rational. And with that said, straight on to yet another story to make your mind boggle.

If I didn't know better, I'd have thought I was peering through the fence at a concentration camp.

The signs on the buildings say "Community College of Aurora," though for now they're serving as an impromptu Camp Katrina. About 160 hurricane survivors are being housed in the dorms, surrounded by fences, roadblocks, security guards and enough armed police officers to invade Grenada.

There's a credentials unit to process every visitor, an intake unit to provide identification tags and a bag of clothes to every evacuee, several Salvation Army food stations, portable toilets, shuttle buses, a green army-tent chapel with church services three times a day and a communications team to keep reporters as far away from actual news as possible.

It probably was easier for a reporter to get inside Gitmo on Tuesday than to penetrate the force field around Lowry.

But survivors occasionally breached the lockdown and came to the fence to tell their stories, each one astonishing....

Comments

[opheliasclone.livejournal.com]

Hey, now. I meant to pass along a little discernment privately. I didn't expect you to eat public crow over it. I'm in the same boat as you, really. If your cognition was temporarily impaired by all this, so has my emotionality been.

The Denver Post is a credible source. The bendable plastic orange fence you see is the same kind used to mark the boundary limits of construction sites in Colorado. Folks who want to climb over one can typically do so. People tend to take the fences as a warning and stay behind them, though. I certainly wouldn't march over one if policemen with guns were around.

If many planeloads of people are expected, I imagine all the armed police officers and other folks are there as a preemptive strike to maintain law and order while offering aid quickly to allay people's fears. I understand there are unfortunately hardened criminals and drug addicts in withdrawal mixed among the refugees. Though they are few in number, they could cause a lot of havoc if they aren't detected and sorted from the general population quickly. It wouldn't be a surprise if some tried to take to Colorado's streets rather than risk being put in jail or into cold turkey rehab.

The real test for me is what happens in a week or so. Will people be issued passes that allow them to come and go? Will the press be allowed to observe once the refugees have been sorted by officials to remove any dangerous persons? Will the orange fences disappear or be replaced by permanent fixtures? Colorado was unfortunately the location of internment camps for Asian people during WWII. I can't rule out the worst, but I hope not.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Hey, now. I meant to pass along a little discernment privately. I didn't expect you to eat public crow over it. I'm in the same boat as you, really. If your cognition was temporarily impaired by all this, so has my emotionality been.

Well, you caught me with my brain set to "stun" -- no stress. I needed to up my game and sharpen my senses.

I want to be optimistic, but I see a lot of the same old things happening that've been emblematic of the worst things of the bad days -- outright disinformation, Pollyanna politicking, the press losing its teeth, no pictures of the (flag-draped) dead kplzthx, the attempt to demonize the very act of civilized dissent.... And they'll keep doing it as long as they can get away with it.