111 · LITTLE BROTHER
calling them aside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept getting sued for doing this, but it didn’t seem to be slowing them down. I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22nd Street to get a coffee — and I passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling over cars for secondary inspection. School was no less wild — the security guards on the metal detectors were also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with odd movements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later. Classes were crazy. I don’t think anyone was able to concentrate. I overheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early that day. It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the false positive strikes again! Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the long way, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars. BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs that wouldn’t dispense their money because they’d had their accounts frozen for suspicious activity (that’s the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!). I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. It had been a good day. People from all over town were crowing about their successes. We’d brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. The news-reports confirmed it — they were calling it the DHS gone haywire, blaming it all on the fakeass “security” that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of the DHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. According to the Chronicle’s economist, a week of this crap would cost the city more than the Bay Bridge bombing had. Mwa-ha-ha-ha. The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three hours late. Why? Because he’d been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then it happened again. Twice. Twice!