'Show me your papers'

Kentucky Post | August 8 2004

Says one news report, officers with the U.S. Capitol Police were getting on buses the other day in Washington and making drivers produce ID cards. The mind flashes to movie memories -- to that often repeated scene in which an official in some Nazi-occupied country barks, "Show me your papers."
It's a chilling phrase, indicative of a police state, and though America remains far, far away from that sort of control, officials should ponder that too many anti-terrorist safeguards could deliver us to something that is too close for comfort.

The latest round of D.C. precautionary measures included not just the quizzing of the bus drivers, but setting up 14 vehicle checkpoints near the Capitol and the closing of still another part of a street -- this in a city where traffic is already a daily headache. The moves were ordered by the chief of the Capitol Police and the Senate's sergeant-at-arms with the approval of Republican and Democratic Senate leaders. The purpose was to further protect the Capitol at a time of heightened security alerts.

Reporters tell us that still more inconveniencing safeguards could be in the offing. And with them may come some increased degree of safety. But officials could lay layer after layer of these measures on top of each other with the same reasoning, and without ever achieving perfect safety. What could happen is that the land of the free could come to resemble a land of the frightened as depicted in decades-old movies.