We will get fooled again

A month before the planes crashed into the towers, I bought a small house and moved my family 24 miles west of New York to the bucolic town of Ridgewood, NJ. Being a lifetime New Yorker, it was a traumatic act-but I have twin daughters and could only barely afford a small two-bedroom apartment in the city.

It took a while to adjust, but Ridgewood is about as good as it gets for a suburb. It is a town of 5.8 square miles with a population of 25,000 people. The last stats I could find on crime in the town had zero murders, two rapes, four robberies, 57 burglaries, and seven stolen cars. In a year. That would be a good day in my old Bronx neighborhood.

I miss living in New York but my kids love Ridgewood, which features a great library where we spend many hours.

Recently I went to use the payphone outside the library. On the phone was a sticker that read: "This phone is tapped. Your conversation is being monitored by the U.S. Government under the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001 Sec. 216 which permits all phone calls to be recorded without a warrant or notification."

I wasn't sure who'd put the sticker up, or if what it said was true, so I did some legwork.

For starters, I took a tour of Atlantic Avenue. If there are New Yorkers involved in the next attack, odds are they'll be from around Atlantic Avenue or Newkirk Avenue, which is where the shitbags who'd planned to bomb the Atlantic Avenue train stop in 1997 were based.

Not one phone on either Avenue had the sticker.

I went to the Federal Court House in Brooklyn and talked to some legal eagles, and they assured me that, yes, the government can now listen into phone conversations if they think terrorists are talking. But in Ridgewood? Outside the library? If only the terrorists were that stupid.

One lawyer sighed and said, "They can do whatever they want at this point. It's like the Civil War when Lincoln suspended due process."

"But is this still America?"

The lawyer laughed. "Not after 9/11 it's not."

I scoured phone booths before finally finding the same sticker, and it turns out the one I'd seen was only part of the full sticker, which also had a website url-crimethinc.com. It's an anarchist site, and bless those rebelling souls for keeping us informed. Now I know never to order lawn fertilizer over a pay phone.

-C.J. Sullivan