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Bush stole the 2004 election as well -
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Molly Little is a "Female Special."
She didn't know. She didn't seek the title. She found out about it at the airport in Portland, Maine.
Little is from South Kingstown, R.I., a freshman at Colby College, and she doesn't like a lot of things her government is doing. So she demonstrates and asks questions and is drawn to people who share her outrage. Last year, she did an internship with the American Friends Service Committee, the organization founded by those peace-loving Quakers.
She made news with some friends last April when she took part in a symbolic washing of the United States flag at the Rhode Island State House.
"We're saying we're the future and we want to cleanse the United States of what it represents right now," she said at the time.
But she has found that speaking out and being very public in her opposition to government policies, while allegedly every citizen's right, can make her stand out in a crowd.
On Nov. 18, she was headed to Fort Benning, Ga., to take part in the annual nonviolent demonstration against The School of the Americas, that shadowy operation that is a training school for so many Latin American soldiers eager to learn the American way of keeping insurgencies in check. The school has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but that euphemistic turn has not stopped thousands of people from showing up every year to say the school is a very bad and un-American idea.
At the Portland airport, Little found that maybe, just maybe, a person can no longer speak out without getting his or her name on a list.
She was running a little late when she got to the airport due to a speeding ticket. At the Delta ticket counter, the attendant asked if she was in the military because she was on a list for an extra security check. The attendant spent some time on the phone but could not tell her why she was on the list.
It was when she got to the checkpoint on the way to the boarding gate that she found she was a "female special." That's what yet another attendant yelled out after Little presented her boarding pass and driver's license.
"I didn't know whether to burst out laughing or slap her or run away," Little says. "But before I could make a choice, I was whisked out of the line of harmless citizens and into an area enclosed by shoulder-height walls."
She says she was patted down and scanned with a metal detector. Her carry-on bag was emptied out, and her textbooks and journal were flipped through by a security person. Again, she could get no satisfactory answer as to why she was being singled out.
She made it to Fort Benning, and it was worth the hassle. She was among a large group of people who shared her deep concerns about where the country is going.
At the airport in Atlanta for the flight home, she was once again directed to a separate room and patted down. The people who did it were very nice, she says.
But still, she is angry about her treatment. She was never told why she made the list. "The idea that I could be dangerous, that I could hurt other human beings, is preposterous," Little says.
But, she concedes, what she went through was merely an aggravation. Many others are being detained for weeks and months and harassed on a daily basis, she says.
And she admits that in times like these, the best place to be is among those who question and challenge and get pulled out of line at airports because they refuse to join the frightened and the silent.
"There is a growing community of people who are outraged at what is going on," Little says.
We can only hope.
Her experience brings back memories of that heated and angry time more than 30 years ago when outspoken critics of President Nixon and the Vietnam War had their names put on an enemies list. There were reporters, priests, entertainers _ people who insisted that the Constitution still protected the right to speak out.
Then, too, a place on the list was considered by many a rock-solid credential of true citizenship. In a mad, paranoid time, it was considered best to stand with those who insisted on speaking out and risking the often harsh consequences.
Now, it seems, there is another list. It might never be officially confirmed, but when an 18-year-old from Rhode Island with a mind of her own can be detained at an airport without explanation it's difficult to escape the feeling that somebody's out there taking names.
It's frightening. But it's also encouraging to know that Molly Little moves on, talking up the need to get angry and get moving and perhaps get on the list.
A Female Special indeed.
© Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue
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Contact: Ken Baldry, 17 Gerrard Road, Islington, London N1 8AY +44(0)20 7359 6294 or e-mail him |
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