As Michael Moore so elegantly demonstrated in Bowling for Columbine, policymakers have perfected the art of using fear to sway the American public into supporting war, overpopulated prisons and the further erosion of our freedoms.
The Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) is now pulling the fear card to regain public support of the left-for-dead 241 toll road extension.
The latest scare tactic involves a report of a grenade on the 5 freeway.
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Visit the Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) RelieveTraffic.org and hit the play button on the “grenade scare” video. Ominous sounding music immediately sets the mood, and though the threat turns out to be bogus, the breathy narrator ends his spiel by noting the failure to complete the 241 toll road “is the real ticking time bomb.”
Here's the type under the video:
FEBRUARY 26, 2010: GRENADE SCARE SHUTS DOWN 1-5 FOR FOUR HOURS.
For four hours, in both directions, the 5 was at a standstill. And so
was the OC. Parents couldn't pick up their kids. Business people missed
meetings. Ambulances & police cars went nowhere fast. The grenade
turned out to be a false alarm. Imagine if it had been a real emergency?
Help us complete the 241 by taking action today.
Such fear mongering can be so successful one wonders if the original report of a grenade on the 5 came from the TCA's Irvine offices.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.