ethics

Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.

All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?

Because they aren’t listening to the calls.

Here is what does happen

In Baltimore thirty years ago, after the detectives figured out which pay phones were dialing pagers, and then did all the requisite background checks and surveillance to identify the drug suspects, they finally went to a judge and asked for a wiretap on several pay phones. The judge looked at the police work and said, okay, you can record calls off those public pay phones, but only if you have someone watching the phones to ensure that your suspects are making the calls and not ordinary citizens. And if you make a mistake and record a non-drug-involved call, you will of course “minimize” the call and cease recording.

It was at that point — and not at the earlier stage of gathering thousands and thousands of dialed numbers and times of call — that the greatest balance was sought between investigative need and privacy rights. And in Baltimore, that wiretap case was made and the defendants caught and convicted, the case upheld on appeal. Here, too, the Verizon data corresponds to the sheets and sheets of printouts of calls from the Baltimore pay phones, obtainable with a court order and without any demonstration of probable cause against any specific individual. To get that far as a law-abiding investigator, you didn’t need to know a target, only that the electronic medium is being used for telephonic communication that is both illegal and legal. It’s at the point of actually identifying specific targets and then seeking to listen to the conversations of those targets that the rubber really hits the road.

Corbella: Allowing brothels will make things worse for prostitutes

Jun 9th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Lisa Corbella in the Calgary Herald

On Sept. 28, 2010, Ontario Superior Court Justice Susan Himel struck down three sections of Canada’s prostitution laws because they exposed sex-trade workers to unreasonable risk.

Himel ruled that communicating for the purposes of prostitution, living on the avails of prostitution and keeping a common bawdy house force sex-trade workers from the safety of their homes and onto the streets, where they are more vulnerable to violence.

The Criminal Code provisions, wrote Himel in her 131-page ruling, “force prostitutes to choose between their liberty interest and their security of the person as protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Himel’s ruling was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court is the end of the line in terms of ensuring that these Criminal Code provisions are not discarded — thus legalizing brothels, pimping and potentially even the bold kind of soliciting made so infamous in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Natasha Falle, who calls herself a sex-trade survivor, says “women like me don’t think the way to protect women is behind legislated doors.”

Speaking at Servants Anonymous’ Cry of the Streets — Evening of Freedom fundraising event May 30 in Calgary, Falle says more women will be enslaved by human traffickers if those laws are deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Looking much younger than her 40 years, Falle is the founder of Sextrade 101 — a public awareness organization and an instructor of police foundations at Humber College in Toronto.

She intends to show up at the Supreme Court next week holding a “pimp stick” — an unravelled coat hanger that her pimp would often heat up on the stove and then use to whip her. Other former sex trade survivors will show up with other torture tools commonly used by pimps, such as curling irons and belts.

The daughter of a former Calgary police officer who, ironically, worked in the vice department, and a mother who worked in a bridal salon, Falle says she turned her first trick in Calgary’s Chinatown when she was 14 with a man with rotten teeth.

Her parents had split up and her family life fell apart. Falle started sleeping on friends’ couches until she wound up on the sofa of four young prostitutes whose pimp was out of town. Pretty soon, Falle followed their lead. At least they had a place to live and food to eat.

“I was trafficked across the country by the man who recruited me and who made false white-picket-fence intimacy promises,” Falle told the crowd.

“I made a lot of money. I bought my pimp a Mercedes. I had a Mustang, we lived in a penthouse, but I was still subjected to all of the violence,” she said. “He broke my arms, my ribs; my nose has been broken three times.”

Her point? This happened indoors. Not on the streets. The former prostitute says the worst beating she ever got was in a common bawdy house she shared with four other teens, so the idea that there’s safety in numbers is a myth.

Falle asks Canadians to consider what will happen to young women and girls should those prostitution laws be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Prostitution will become a licensed business, pimps will be legitimate business people, billboards advertising brothels could start appearing on roadsides and “a brothel could open up in the apartment next to yours or in the house next to yours,” Falle says.

While prostitution is legal in Canada, running a bawdy house, living off of the avails and soliciting for the purposes of prostitution are not.

“If we legalize these three areas, will brothels be allowed to set up a booth at the high school job fair?” she asks.

Just last month, two men were arrested in the Toronto area after recruiting a teenage Windsor girl to work in a strip club. They then took her to Toronto, where they forced her to prostitute herself.

“I think many well-meaning Canadians support Bedford’s challenge against Canada’s prostitution laws because they believe it will help vulnerable women,” Falle says. “But they are mistaken. It will make things much worse. It will legitimize pimping and human trafficking. It will enslave more women and girls.”

Corbella is right. All of the serious research that is out there shows that brothels are violent, violent places where women suffer and are exploited even in places like Nevada where they are illegal. This does not help women, it exploits them even more.

Paul Martin accuses residential schools of ‘cultural genocide’

Apr 27th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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‘Call a spade a spade,’ former prime minister says

Residential schools engaged in “cultural genocide,” former prime minister Paul Martin said Friday at the hearings of the federal Truth And Reconciliation Commission, adding that aboriginal Canadians must now be offered the best educational system.

“Let us understand that what happened at the residential schools was the use of education for cultural genocide, and that the fact of the matter is — yes it was. Call a spade a spade,” Martin said to cheers from the audience at the Montreal hearings.

“And what that really means is that we’ve got to offer aboriginal Canadians, without any shadow of a doubt, the best education system that is possible to have.”

The residential school system existed from the 1870s until the 1990s and saw about 150,000 native youth taken from their families and sent to church-run schools under a deliberate policy of “civilizing” First Nations.

Many students were physically, mentally and sexually abused. Some committed suicide or died fleeing their schools. Mortality rates reached 50 per cent at some schools.

In the 1990s, thousands of victims sued the Canadian government as well as churches that ran the schools. The $1.9-billion settlement of that suit in 2007 prompted an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the creation of the commission.

But the government has clashed with the commission and recently had to be ordered by an Ontario court to find and turn over documents from Library and Archives Canada.

“Every document is relevant,” Martin said. “We have hid this for 50 years. It’s existed for 150. Surely to God, Canadians are entitled … aboriginal Canadians and non-aboriginal Canadians, to know the truth. And so let the documents be released.”

Romeo Saganash has also testified of this time in residential schools

After the panel, Saganash took to the main stage at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel and officially gave his statement to the TRC about his time at the La Tuque residential school in the late 1970s.

He tearfully spoke about his brother Johnny who died under mysterious circumstances when he was just 6 years old. Johnny was buried in an unmarked grave near the residential school in Moose Factory, Ont. There was no explanation given to his parents, no death certificate, no physical record that the little Cree boy had ever existed under the care of the federal government.

It took 40 years for the Saganash family to find Johnny’s grave and they did so not with the help of authorities but rather through the work of Saganash’s journalist sister Emma. When his mother finally saw footage of the burial site, Saganash said she wept like he had never seen her weep before.

The NDP MP has also struggled with the legacy of pain from his stolen childhood. The struggle caused Saganash to seek treatment for his alcoholism last December after he was kicked off an Air Canada flight for being heavily intoxicated.

But Saganash spent little time focusing on the past, choosing rather to divert the attention to the private members bill he tabled before the House of Commons in January. The bill would force the federal government to ensure all its laws are consistent with the UN’s declaration of indigenous rights — a document the Cree politician helped draft before being elected to public office.

He concluded his emotional address on a hopeful note, quoting a passage from a speech South African leader Nelson Mandela gave after his 27-year stint as a political prisoner.

“It was during those long and lonely years that the hunger for freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people — white and black. I knew, as I knew anything, that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. For all have been robbed of their humanity.

Photos from the Boston Manhunt

Apr 20th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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The entire set can be seen at Boston Globe’s The Big Picture

On the Take

Apr 20th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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All but three of the 45 senators who voted against gun control measures received donations from the NRA and other pro-gun groups.

All but three of the 45 senators who torpedoed gun control measures in Congress on Wednesday have received money from firearms lobbyists, according to new analysis by the Guardian and the Sunlight Foundation.

Some, such as Indiana Republican Dan Coats, registered donations from pro-shooting groups as recently as three weeks ago, when the proposal to extend background checks was still seen as likely to pass.

President Obama and congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a gun attack, have both accused the Senate of being in thrall to gun money following Wednesday’s vote. “They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-second amendment,” said Obama.

Yet campaign disclosures show the group were also direct recipients of gun cash. The National Rifle Association alone has given $800,000 to 40 of the senators who voted against the amendment since 1990, much of it in the run-up to the last election, according to Sunlight Foundation figures.

Information for the period since the Newtown school shooting is harder to come by because many quarterly filings due out on Tuesday have been delayed by the suspected ricin attack on members of Congress.

But Guardian analysis of the data available so far for 2013 reveals that some groups have continued to be active outside the election cycle – including Safari Club International, a pro-hunting organisation which gave $1,000 to Senator Coats on 29 March, according to the filings.

Documents also show the NRA saw a surge in donations to its lobbying arm in the months following Newtown – registering a record $2.7m in cash during January and February. Further disclosures showing the scale of its recent donations, particularly to politicians in the House of Representatives, are expected on Saturday.

The Gun Owners of America and National Association for Gun Rights – two groups seen as more conservative than the NRA – have also been active in the Senate, giving $9,000 and $5,000 respectively to Ted Cruz, one of the leaders of Republican opposition to the amendment.

Gabby Giffords has this commentary

Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Remains from 9/11 are still sitting under a tarp on Staten Island

Apr 7th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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What in the world?

On the phone were Monica Gabrielle and Kristen Breitweiser. Their husbands died at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11 attack. This week, a new effort to find remains from the site uncovered 39 pieces of what appeared to be human bones. That was the yield from the first three days of work in a process that is expected to go on for at least two months.

It turns out that 60 dump trucks’ worth of soil from the trade center site, identified as long as two and half years ago as possibly holding human remains, has been sitting untouched beneath a tarp on Staten Island. The startling possibility exists that the remains of a large number of people could be found and identified in the months ahead, nearly 12 years after the attack.

“We are not stupid,” Monica Gabrielle said, in classic understatement. “We wouldn’t be surprised if they are finding shards and tiny pieces down there 50 years from now.”

Ms. Breitweiser jumped in. “But if they found some of this stuff two years ago,” she asked, “what is the explanation for why it is sitting so long?”

Neither woman was in a hurry to make demands for attention from a public for whom Sept. 11 is an episode of faded power. Yet their relentlessness over the last 12 years has served major civic purposes that would otherwise not have been met.

Homeless Edmontonians speak about impact of residential schools

Mar 25th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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This video is heartbreaking.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada paid a visit to the Boyle Street Community Services in Edmonton on Saturday.

As Nicole Weisberg reports, the commission has been gathering stories about the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal Peoples across Canada — but this is the first time it has visited Edmonton’s inner city.

Amsterdam’s (failed) quest to tame prostitution

Mar 25th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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From The Atlantic

Has Amsterdam had enough of its breezy reputation? It may be famous for its in-your-face window prostitution, but the city has just voted to place tighter controls on its brothels. From this summer onwards, Amsterdam’s legal age for prostitution will rise from 18 to 21, and brothels will be forced to remain closed between four and nine in the morning. Prostitutes will have to pass language tests and have shorter shifts, while brothel keepers will be obliged to produce business plans demonstrating how they will protect their workers’ health and safety.

Seen from a country where prostitution is largely banned, these changes might seem laughably modest. They’re carefully targeted nonetheless. Younger women are most likely to fall victim to human traffickers, while those that don’t speak any Dutch or English find it much harder to contact police or social workers in cases of abuse. Meanwhile, early morning closure is planned because the time of day is seen as a problem period, with nobody else about in the streets to monitor or rein in bad behavior. Amsterdam’s city council considers the moves so vital that the city is going it alone, introducing laws that (while currently being debated) haven’t yet passed through the Dutch Parliament.

Amsterdam’s haste is understandable. It may be well policed and eye-poppingly unusual, but the city’s central red light district still feels like a place where women’s hopes go to die. Around 75 percent of the 5,000 to 8,000 prostitutes working in the city are from abroad, and many are believed to have been trafficked. Holland legalized prostitution in 2000 as a way of stopping exploitation, but evidence suggests that more women than ever are being forced into brothels against their will. A study from the London School of Economics published this winter found that in countries where selling sex was decriminalized, human trafficking has increased. While the number of women entering prostitution voluntarily grows under legalization, demand grows yet further, creating a shortfall filled by women trafficked and run by pimps.

I have read several articles that say that it also just raises the bar when it comes to kink. Instead of going to the red light district, men want the increased thrill of using women outside the red light district. The red light district solves (or tries to solve) some problems while creating new ones.

See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya

Mar 23rd, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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A fascinating article about a compartment maker who was sentenced 24 years in jail.

On November 18, as Anaya drove his Ford F-350 through a Home Depot parking lot, he noticed a dark sedan that seemed to be shadowing him in an adjacent aisle. He thought the car might belong to friends. But when the sedan stopped in front of him, the men who got out were strangers to Anaya. They identified themselves as DEA agents and ordered him out of his truck. “You know why we’re here,” one agent said to Anaya, who was bewildered to be in handcuffs for the first time in his life. “Your compartments.”

The agents took Anaya to the DEA’s office in downtown Los Angeles, where they questioned him at length. Anaya spoke freely about his traps, estimating that he had built 15 over the past year. He even boasted about his perfectionism, stressing that he was always careful to conceal his wire harnesses.

The agents told Anaya that he could avoid any potential legal complications by doing them a big favor: They wanted him to outfit his clients’ cars with GPS trackers and miniature cameras, so the DEA could build cases against suspected traffickers. They told him to take a few days to mull over the offer, then they released him from custody.

The next day, a dazed Anaya drove to his father’s grave to meditate on the choice before him. The epiphany he had while kneeling by the headstone wasn’t comforting. “I had a feeling that no matter what decision I made, something bad was going to happen,” Anaya says. “But I couldn’t do anything that would put my family in danger.” And while he felt he could handle jail time, he worried that any trafficker big enough to interest the DEA would have no compunctions about killing his children, nieces, and nephews. That made the decision clear.

It’s an interesting read about technology, ethics of the DEA (go to jail or have you and your family killed), and about a guy who was either clueless or a drug conspirator (you decide… I think he was both). Best thing I read this week by far.

Moscow execs hire ambulances to beat the traffic

Mar 23rd, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Not sure if I am appalled or am thinking of a new business opportunity

Police in Moscow are to carry out checks on ambulances after reports that emergency vehicles have been fitted with plush interiors and are being rented out to VIP commuters hoping to dodge the city’s appalling traffic jams.

They face random checks after companies advertising rides in “ambulance-taxis” for upwards of 6000 roubles ($185) an hour appeared on the internet.

The vehicles are said to use their sirens to scatter traffic and deliver harried businessman to meetings on time.

A law enforcement source told Izvestiya that one such vehicle had already been identified. “During a patrol, a medical car was stopped because it was breaking traffic rules,” the source said.

“The driver appeared strange, and did not resemble an ambulance driver at all.

“Police officers opened the automobile to check it and saw that the interior was fitted out like a high-class limousine with comfortable seats for transporting VIP passengers.”

Inside the ambulance were “not medical personnel but some people in civilian clothes who refused to identify themselves”, the source said.

Moscow’s boulevards and ring roads are often at a standstill because of badly parked cars and a lack of restrictions on driving in the city centre.

“What is it that the correctional service actually corrects? In my view very little…and…the justice system is completely criminal and it should be studied…”

Mar 16th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Dr. Gabor Mate on addictions & corrections

According to CSC, 80% of offenders are substance abusers.

3 Women a Day Killed by a Partner in South Africa

Mar 10th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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As the AP reports

Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law graduate shot and killed by Oscar Pistorius, was statistically just one of three women killed on Valentine’s Day by an intimate partner, according to a study on violence against women that damns South Africa as having “the highest rate ever reported in research anywhere in the world.”

It’s more than just murder

Newspaper editorials and talk radio shows are examining traditional chauvinistic attitudes, gun control laws and weaknesses in the police and court systems that allow many perpetrators to walk free — thus discouraging women from reporting. This week police disclosed that they do not have enough rape kits, needed to collect evidence.

“Of all the matrics (high school graduates) in your class, one third have been raped!” says a public education announcement on Talk Radio 702, referring to statistics that estimate more than 30 percent of girls have been raped by the time they are 18.

It seems there are few places for South African girls to be safe: Many are raped in their homes by a relative or family friend; many are raped at school, often by teachers; only a quarter are raped by someone they do not know.

In South Africa, statistics say someone gets raped every four minutes. Only 66,196 incidents were reported to police last year and their investigations led to only 4,500 convictions.

“If data for all violent assaults, rapes and other sexual assaults against women are taken into account, then approximately 200,000 adult women are reported as being attacked in South Africa every year,” Lerato Moloi of the South African Institute for Race Relations said. The real figure is considerably higher, she said, since most cases never are reported.

The rate of murders of women in South Africa is equally troubling.

A woman is killed by an intimate partner every eight hours in South Africa, a probable underestimate because no perpetrator is identified in 20 percent of killings, according to a study published in August and co-authored by Professor Rachel Jewkes of the South African Medical Research Council. That is double the rate of such murders in the United States, according to the report. The study was based on a sample of deceased females aged 14 years and older at national mortuaries, since police statistics do not separate the killings of women by partners from those by strangers.

In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
A woman’s chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Hunt for unknown sexual predator took Toronto police 22 months

Mar 10th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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In March 2011, Det. Paul Krawczyk began an online hunt that would last 22 months. It would end as one of the worst cases he’s ever investigated, culminating in the arrest of beloved Saint John city Councillor Donnie Snook.

Donnie Snook was as close to sainthood as it got in Saint John.

Sitting on city council for two consecutive terms, the 41-year-old former Salvation Army officer championed the razing of derelict buildings, helped drive biker gangs out of town and fed warm lunches to children through a Christian youth ministry.

“He was the soldier for the marginalized,” said former city councillor Patty Higgins.

But that image was shattered this January after a Toronto police officer sitting in a dark, windowless room 1,500 kilometres away spent 22 months tracking an unknown predator online.

Snook is now facing three counts of sexual touching related to one child, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, dating back to December 2006. He is also charged with one count of making child pornography related to the same child and two counts each of possessing and distributing child pornography between March 2011 and January 2013.

None of the allegations against Snook has been proven in court. He has resigned his council seat and is suspended with pay from his position as executive director of the Inner City

Youth Ministry. His defence lawyer, Dennis Boyle, refused to comment when contacted by the Star.

In what may soon be one of the largest cases of alleged child abuse in recent Canadian memory, the Star has learned that since Snook’s arrest as many as 20 children and their families have come forward with allegations and further charges are pending, according to multiple sources.

A physics professor and the bikini model

Mar 9th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Paul Frampton is a 69-year-old theoretical particle physicist who has co-authored papers with Nobel laureates. In late 2011, the absentminded professor met a Czech bikini model online. Over email and Yahoo chat, they became romantically involved and she sent him a plane ticket to come meet her at a photo shoot in Bolivia. Then she asked him to bring a bag of hers with him on his flight The entire story is crazy.

What have we done?

Mar 3rd, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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From The StarPhoenix’s blog. A note from the giant icicle before it was torn down. Luckily Jeremy Warren was there to get the story.

You must know a few things before they hack me apart and I melt into your memories. First, stop calling me an icicle. I’m more of an ice wall, no? You’ve seen the photos by now. My elegant curves run from the top of the apartment to the ground. I hang for no one.

Second, WHY? Why must you destroy me? There are more perilous icicles hovering above Saskatoon sidewalks and apartments, and yet it’s my ice on the firing line. I blame the media spotlight. Its hot glare is not good for my kind.

One afternoon I’m at home — in my case it’s just a wall but it’s still home — and a reporter comes around, lets neighbours talk garbage about me and then publishes a story accusing me of threatening innocent citizens. Did I get an interview? I was not asked for my side of the story. I got the cold shoulder.
But that’s how we are treated, my frozen friends and I. How many of you have snapped an icicle hanging from your windows and trucks? Those are our children cut down in their prime. This is ice-ism.

I am not an old soul, but my young ice age has provided some insight into this world. Stuck to the same spot for months, I can’t help but notice the best and worst of you. I watched a young couple fight on the street, a blizzard of pent up resentment blowing between them. I watched two teens rush to the aid of an old man who slipped on the icy sidewalk. A microcosm of humanity has passed before me and I came to love you. Now you’re all left cold to my pleas of mercy.

I will likely die today. Think of me when you slip on your skates. Think of me when you drop a few ice cubes in your warm cola. I did nothing wrong and I am being punished. Justice is blind and maybe that’s why she moves at a such a glacial pace.