Sometimes I’m a bit naive, I must confess. When I read this article in this morning’s Day, I was frankly puzzled:
Steve Masalin said after almost every snowstorm, residents call him to complain their roads haven’t been plowed.
“It happens frequently, almost all the time,” said Masalin, the town’s director of Public Works, on Thursday. “Plows could have been down their road one or two times but still they have an inch or two of snow in the morning.”
Mayor Fred Allyn’s proposal for funding of global positioning systems in town-owned vehicles could answer those questions.
Partly it was the bad writing (what questions had been posed that needed answers?) but mostly I was a bit mystified. Why, I wondered in my innocence, would Ledyard snow plow operators need GPS devices to find their way around Ledyard. Shouldn’t they know the roads like the back of their hands?
Gradually, it dawned on me that the point of the devices was not to aid the drivers, but to spy on them. Fittingly, Ledyard’s mayor wants to get the money to buy them from Homeland Security. It’s somewhat ironic that the police chief, who would probably not balk at spying on everyone else, isn’t quite so happy when the shoe’s on the other foot.
This is how it creeps up on us. George Orwell would recognize the world we’re creating. He had no idea how we would do it, but he knew we would do it if we could.
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