A tattle-tale society filled with panicked people

A couple of friends shared this with me - I've left off their names because I don't want them associated with this site: they are in enough trouble already!

Report of armed man leads to lockdown at Wal-Mart:

Kirksville, Mo. — A report of an armed man acting erratically in the
Wal-Mart parking lot Wednesday led to the store being temporarily locked
down before Kirksville Police responded to and defused the situation
with no injuries.

According to Kirksville Police Chief Jim Hughes, a passerby stopped a
Kirksville Police officer and said they had seen an individual acting
erratically in a truck in the Wal-Mart parking lot shortly before 2:30
p.m. The passerby believed the individual had a gun to his head.

As readers already know, Wal-Mart has recently publicly teamed up with the US Department of Homeland Security to encourage their customers, associates, and building-dwellers to be on the lookout for terrorists and other evil scum.

Person A wondered if this was the first-fruits of that partnership.

Person B responded: Probably not - just a nosy parker walking by. But it might make Wal-Mart think twice about the wisdom of teaming up with DHS.

Reminds me of a whole bunch of people in XXXXX who reported to the cops that they saw a "young man walking down the sidewalk wearing a holster" (empty holster) within a block of a school - led to an afternoon's lockdown on the school and terrorizing of an entire neighborhood as they searched for this "dangerous person."

And that in turn reminds me of the silly "dependent wife" (using the term specifically as a putdown, instead of the now preferred "family member: spouse) in a Fort XXXXXX housing area who called, hysterically, to the Post Engineer's work order desk demanding that someone come down to her housing area and immediately get rid of the horrible snake what was out in the middle of the street before one of the wife's children, or some other child, went to play with it and got bitten and turned purple and died. The work order clerk tried to calm her, and said that she could just keep the children away from that part of the street for a few minutes and the snake would go ahead and slither across the street and disappear into the woods, and nothing would happen and no one needed to come down to deal with it. "But you don't understand!" the wife wailed. "The snake is DEAD. It won't go away!!!"

Today, our society has become such a web of snitches, informants, tattletales, and "dependent" people who can't and won't do anything for themselves that we are incredibly lucky that we don't just turn into Brave New World voluntarily. (Some would say we are doing so right now.) We convince ourselves that nothing - and everything - is our business. We see our neighbor's patio on fire and we don't go over there with our water house: we call 9-1-1. We see a kid spraying graffiti on a church building and we don't try and stop him; we wait until we get home and call 9-1-1. We don't like the fact that our neighbor hasn't mowed his lawn in a month and instead of going over to visit (and, heaven forbid, offer to help), we call the code enforcement office. The list can go on and on: we are now conditioned to let government do everything possible for us. But we then complain about taxes and how we get in trouble. What a society!