Essay 1854

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

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Factory raid doesn’t make us any safer

BY SUE ONTIVEROS

So this is what safety feels like? Because that’s what our government must want me to feel after watching TV footage of big, burly guys with “Homeland Security” plastered on their backs haul away a bunch of little immigrants working at a factory in New Bedford, Mass. A factory where that same report said the workers were making safety vests for our troops in Iraq.

I wonder who’s making sure those orders are being finished and shipped where they’re needed now that the workers are in detention centers. How nice that Homeland Security swooped in just in time to delay the job getting done. Our government in action: keeping us safe and our troops even safer. Gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?

Ever since the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001, the murderous acts our government was so unprepared for, the Bush administration has been trying to make us all feel safer. For that’s what we lost that sunny September day: the feeling that the United States of America was the safest place in the world. I think about that a lot, about how my family and I happily watched a ballgame the night before Sept. 11 under clear blue skies and got back on the L that night without a care in the world. Well, we might have made sure no one lifted our wallets on the ride home, but we didn’t feel unsafe. Not the way we feel now.

And Homeland Security knows that, and wants us and the rest of Americans to feel safe. If Homeland Security was using its energies to find a theme song, it would choose the old Barry Manilow song, “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again.” (But, of course, the department isn’t looking for a theme song. How silly. That would be a waste of its efforts, and we know it doesn’t do that.) Homeland Security wants you and me to feel safe again.

Instead, I looked at that footage and thought: This is what is keeping me safe? Taking scared and compliant people in handcuffs away from their children? This is what is supposed to be making me feel better? Well, it didn’t. Instead, I was thinking, why the heck aren’t our Homeland Security dollars being used to round up actual terrorists?

Have any of these raids turned up even one would-be terrorist? (If they had, don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?) After raid after raid, you’d think Homeland Security could have figured out that not one potential terrorist is under cover working too many hours in a factory for little pay at a job that went begging for American citizens to do it.

Nope, I don’t feel safer. Instead, I feel even less safe than before. Now I saw with my own eyes that Homeland Security isn’t out rounding up terrorists.

I hate that my government is wasting its time and putting its efforts into hurting families. Yes, the “family values” administration is spending my tax dollars to rip apart families. I am sorry, but legal or illegal, all I can think of is crying children. That raid left babies without mothers to nurse them. According to one news story, a nursing baby ended up in the hospital because its mother was taken in that raid. Little children came home to empty apartments and didn’t know where their parents were. Yeah, I feel safer.

About the same time as that raid, coyotes ended up on a runway at O’Hare Airport and caused delays. Turns out the coyotes, which are getting more used to our city’s urban areas, show up on the runways pretty often.

If an animal can get onto those runways, how hard do you think it would be for a trained terrorist with a mission in mind? Don’t you think if Homeland Security were doing its job, nothing could get onto our airport runways?

So, if watching Homeland Security cart off mommies and daddies makes you feel safer, you’re pretty lucky. Naive, but lucky.

Me, I’m scared as hell that Homeland Security is more interested in offering an illusion of safety than the real deal.