The note came in around midnight on my Facebook wall.
“Ever thought of doing an article jab at Maine Police and Fire Alerts Facebook page?” the lass inquired. “Hannaford statewide does not have enough tinfoil!”
Ah, yes. The fire alerts guy. For the six of you who don’t know what this is about, a little background: Maine Police and Fire Alerts came on the scene more than a year ago and quickly built an audience of thousands. The page is set up to deliver breaking news, as it happens, in the form of police scanner activity. If fire crews are sent to a mulch fire in Thorndike, details from the scanner go up on the page. When police respond to a sword fight in Lewiston (it happens; pirates are everywhere) MPFA will post the alert and just sit back and watch those comments come.
It’s a good system. By getting that information out into the mosh pit that is Facebook, the matter is opened up for discussion and information sharing.
It’s a beautiful thing. The problems begin when the fellow behind the page turns his attention away from the police scanner and focuses instead on the world at large. Once a week or so, he posts random reports that have nothing to do with fires, crashes or cats stuck in trees. It has to do with … conspiracy!
“President Barack Obama signed the NDAA act back into action,” goes one snippet, “allowing police officers and federal agents to come pull you out of your house at 3 a.m. and bring you to FEMA even if you have never committed a crime in your life …”
“All area law enforcement agencies have been told to prepare for mass civil unrest followed by riots followed by mass arrest in every city across America this summer …”
Bam! In a completely random and grammar-lacking way, news of a global takeover is announced. What we have here is either a modern-day Patrick Henry or the cyber version of the boy who cried wolf.
And my, how riled the Facebook masses become.
“Looks like I should get my tinfoil hat on.”
“Stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“This guy must be on crack.”
“If these kind of things were happening it would be all over the news!”
“I’m unfriending this clown.”
There’s an audience for conspiracy theory, sure enough, but this isn’t it. Here, we find dozens upon dozens of comments from people who scoff and ridicule, rant and rage against the absurdity. They don’t just disbelieve, they are downright insulted by these wild assertions. They came for news of kitchen fires and car wrecks and got black helicopters and the New World Order.
It’s been my experience that people will always rebel against the notion that they are being tricked. When the white men first came paddling over from Europe, there was likely a Native American or two who sensed that treachery was afoot.
NATIVE AMERICAN ONE: “I don’t like it. These guys are up to something.”
NATIVE AMERICAN TWO: “Have you been smoking crack?”
Same when the Nazi empire began to rise, same at the start of the Inquisition and on and on, back through the ages when groups of men have conspired to conquer others.
I’m at a place in my life where I’m unwilling to close my ears, or my mind, to concepts that might have struck me as absurd a few years back. If you had told me years ago that a kid would get kicked out of school for chewing his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, I would have laughed until stuff flew out of my nose. If you told me that somebody somewhere would declare that the term “brown bag” is racist — and that many would agree with this assessment — I would have gaped at you with my mouth wide open, waiting for the punchline.
The world has gone mad, I mean to say. Things that would have sounded like lunacy 10 years ago are generally yawned at today. RFID chips inserted into our hands? Drones flying all over the place, for both war and recreation? Near-daily beheadings on the evening news? A machine 17 miles wide firing particles around a ring at such great velocities, there are genuine concerns that the resulting collisions might create a black hole or tear into another dimension? A monstrous government agency buying up billions of rounds of ammunition — roughly five bullets for every living person in the country — over a two-year span?
Life has begun to feel like a cheesy end-of-the-world action flick; can you blame those with distrustful natures for their alarm? To the conspiracy-minded, even dull news seems like another sign of the coming crisis.
The Federal Reserve is moving out of New York for the first time in a hundred years because — and these are their words, not mine — they’re suddenly concerned about natural disasters. NORAD is forking over $700 million to upgrade Cold War bunkers deep inside Cheyenne Mountain because … well, it’s probably nothing. Natural disasters and such.
You can call the Maine Police and Fire Alerts guy paranoid if you want, but you’ll have difficulty knocking down all of his assertions.
A U.S. president really did sign a law allowing the government to throw a person into secret prisons: indefinitely, without charge, without explanation and without access to legal council.
It really has become perfectly legal for the U.S. government to engage in propaganda against its own people; to use television, newspapers, radio and social media to distort the truth or to skip the facts altogether.
The NSA really is helping itself to our private phone conversations, emails and text messages — and it sounded like so much fun, now some city police departments are doing it, too.
There are plenty of documented agendas, schemes and operations out there in the wild, enough to keep the conspiracy pages rocking and rolling around the clock. Does that mean we’re about to succumb to a global takeover that’s been planned for decades? Hey, don’t ask me, man. I only came to read the comments.
As for Mr. Maine Police and Fire Alerts, maybe he’s not being paranoid at all.
Maybe they really are out to get him.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Or so he would have you believe. Email true conspiracies to mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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