Defraying the Cost of Ignorance

This week has been an instructive one for the people of Boston and, as they say, education don't come cheap.

I suspect by now everyone's heard of the ad campaign for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie and how it tied up the city of Boston for a day and incurred about a million dollars in expense. I have no idea how they arrived at that figure, but that would be the day's salary for some 6500 people who made $50,000 a year. If there were fewer than that involved, maybe they all got real good lunches like the movie people do.

I think some of that cost may be for shame reduction.

Until this story broke I'd never heard of the  Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but I'm hardly in their demographic. I guess I'd seen Frylock around, the box of french fries guy, but I had no idea who he was, so the little guy waving his finger who caused all the fuss might have struck me as an object of curiosity had I seen him all lit up hanging from the bottom of a bridge.

I'm not sure I would have called a cop about it, but I keep forgetting that half of the US population is living in a constant state of barely-manageable fear. Had I seen one of the devices up close, again, I'm not sure I would have reported it to the authorities, but from what I've been able to gather I probably would have recognized it for what it was, a collection of LEDs.

On Fox News, of course, they kept talking about circuit boards, which I guess also frighten their viewers. Later on, kids on the Internet dismissed it as a Light Bright, a toy I know about but was too old to play with. The truth, as usual, lays somewhere between the horrifying circuit board and some kid's toy, but I suspect it lays closer to the toy than anything else and I doubt the device was any more frightening than those message boards we used to have at work to advertise our loan rates.

Even allowing for the first person who saw this to panic and call the authorities. a person I'm sure sleeps poorly, the escalation of the event is shameful. I might have been concerned, too, but I think my response would have been closer to that of seeing a lizard in the back yard or a mouse scurry across the floor than anything else. When those things happen, I jump and am startled, but a moment later I calm down. There's the initial fear, but I think that has more to do with instinct than anything else and is out of my control. As soon as it passes, about one or two heartbeats, I'm my more usual calm self.

I might have looked more closely at the thing and recognized it for what it was. No, not an ad campaign, but a harmless bit of electrical gadgetry. From the pitctures I've seen, I haven't seen any evidence of anything bulky enough to contain any quantity of explosive big enough to do anything, but the city's response to the thing scares me more than the device itself.

Fine, Joe Citizen freaks out. That's to be expected. Not only are half the people eager to swallow ever-increasing helpings of fear, but half are below average in intelligence. What astounds me isn't Joe's reaction, but that of the Boston's finest. I'm certainly no expert, not like the members of Boston's vaunted bomb sqauad, but I can't imagine how anyone trained to deal with explosives could have taken more than a minute before shrugging his or her shoulders, laughing, and giving the "safe" sign. Sure, they don't know what it is at first, but aren't these people supposed to know more about bombs and bombing devices than, say, me?

So now the city's suing. That doesn't surpise me, but I think it's more to save face than anything else.