Boy, this makes me feel old:
Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver's license.I remember being young and feisty, and I could look at something that bugged me in my environment and then set about arranging a confrontation. Ha! this is me against the pig businessmen! I will not conform! I'm not a sheeple!
There are two interesting stories in one which I thought would be of interest to Boing Boing readers. The first involves the loss prevention employee physically preventing my egress from the property. The second story involves my right as a U.S. citizen to not have to show my papers when asked. (Despite having verbally identified myself, the officer arrested me for failing to provide a driver's license while standing on a sidewalk.)
Now I'm old and it seems the most obvious thing in the world that if the store wants to see my receipt, I show them my receipt. It's not a big sacrifice on my part. I somehow don't get the whiff of the gulag during the whole ordeal. Don't even feel violated.
Sure, my life isn't as exciting as the defiant youth sometimes in front of me in line. But I get to watch the show as the kid maneuvers around to make the store worker touch his arm. And I get to watch as the poor violated youth grabs his traumatized appendage and falls to the ground wailing. You go kid! enjoy yourself. One day the wonderful self-righteousness will leave you and you'll not get it back. One day you'll wonder what the big deal was, and, shudder, you'll even be able to understand how a retail store may do simple things like this in order to slow the evaporation of their inventory. One day you'll wonder how something as simple as holding out a receipt even made it onto your radar.
***Update: Forgot to note before, the young firebrand has a blog, Michael Righi dotcom, and he's..... drum-roll please..... asking for donations to his legal defense fund. (And darnit, I just gave the year's quota of injustice-money to some boys who go to a school in Texas where they don't know it's a free country and everyone has a right to wear black eyeliner)
