<Rice urged Americans to remain vigilant, calling the public "the first line of defense" against attacks. "There have been many cases in which Americans who were alert to suspicious circumstances around them have been able to tip law enforcement officials," she said.

My thoughts on this are unfocused, so I'm reluctant to expose them to the dogs of war, but I can't let this go unchallenged. A little voice in my unconscious is screaming.

Just a couple of these unfocused thoughts:

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The lady in Georgia who "would have been a hero" is not one. She's not a villain, either. Three people who were not guilty are now unemployed because of the overreaction of law enforcement officials (including holding them on running a toll booth, which examination of the actual evidence proved to be untrue), compounded by public threats to their place of employment even in view of their exculpation of any wrongdoing.

We have been protected from three medical students. I'm thrilled. We don't need more doctors in this country. How much of this kind of protection can we stand?

A long time ago, when I was the mother of one infant, I became friends with a single mother of three in my apartment complex. (She and the children's father were divorced.) She was receiving child support and working part-time, but was not on any form of public assistance.

One day she called up in a panic: the child welfare authorities had been to her home, with the proper legal papers allowing them to come in, look wherever they wanted, and possibly take the children into protective custody. The reason? Someone in the apartment complex had reported that she was not feeding her children. Were they required to divulge the source of the tip? No. Were they allowed to disrupt her home and threaten to take her children based on this anonymous and uninformed tip? Yes.

Well, the child welfare people took a look around, decided the tip had no immediate grounds, and had left with the warning that the visit would remain in their files.

I later found out (from the tip's source, who felt terrible and wanted to talk to someone) that the youngest child, who was 4 at the time, had stopped at her home to play with her stepdaughter and had told her, "I didn't have anything to eat since yesterday 'cause Mommy won't give me any food." Instead of calling Mommy, she assumed the worst -- because of her own experiences with her stepdaughter's mother -- and called the child welfare authorities immediately to create a record. The truth was, "Mommy won't let me eat what I want, so sometimes I don't eat my dinner and go to bed hungry", told through the perception of a 4-year-old. But the stepmom/tipster was an instant mom who had no experience with which to judge a 4-year-old's grasp of reality.

Needless to say, I never told the mom who suffered the state-sponsored home invasion which of her neighbors was the source of the accusation. But she never got over it.

This is where unsubstantiated tips followed up by law enforcement with insufficient investigation lead. If the child welfare authorities had been as overeager as the police in Florida, they would have taken the children and investigated the premises later. As it was, an innocent parent was unduly traumatized.

Yet the tipster was not a villain. This doesn't make it right.

There's more than one way to destroy a society. One way is by direct attack. Another is by turning us against each other. If free speech is the real target, the second strategy is the more effective. Which would we prefer? Or would we prefer to find a third way?

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I spent the better part of last week at the Pennsylvania Library Association conference. On the last day, I attended a workshop on how to avoid being charged with a federal felony while adhering to the principles underpinning my profession, that is, that it's nobody else's damn business what people read, and that "Guilt By Reading" is a serious attack on the First.

Yes, the Patriot Act was the subject.

I can tell you this: I am very very very angry at my government right now. They can come and take whatever they please whenever they please without accountability and in secret. If the person to whom they serve the search warrant tells her board at all, tells her boss at all, even tells her LAWYER without permission, she will be arrested for the commission of a felony. Is there a way for her to defend herself against accusations that she (many people in small libraries work alone) was complicit in the theft of the equipment? No. One felony or another -- what might the difference be? State or federal prison?

Does my rage make me a terrorist?

Do I trust the FBI? No. I don't know what kinds of lists they are compiling, and for what purposes they are compiling them. I know what they say they are using the information for, but I don't believe them entirely. Some of the information will be used for that, but what about the rest?

Informing on one's fellow citizens is hailed by the Administration as an act of patriotism. Indeed, if one is a witness to a crime, it's a citizen's duty to come forward with the information gathered by one's own eyes and ears. Citizens reporting rumor as fact, police overzealousness resulting in the arrest or restraint of innocent people on spurious or poorly investigated charges, and federal agencies keeping secret records of unknown content on unknown people for unknown purposes will not lead to unity. It will lead to silence among organized criminals, character assassination among the malicious, and suspicion of each other everywhere.

Let's hear one more rousing chorus of "God Bless America". Perhaps it will drown out the sound of silence.

Regards--
Mary Anne