Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

Kazim Ali (here) writes about how poetry professor in a small college in the Northeast decides to recycle old manuscripts and becomes an object of suspicion. The story begins:

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

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This innocuous recycling ended up with the bomb squad, state police, and an investigation.  And apparently part of the reason for all of this was that the recycler was Middle Eastern.

KJ