Your Papers Please!

One of the scary moments in any number of movies over the years was when the hero or heroine was confronted by the police with the demand to see their papers.

Now it was scary either because they were spies using false identities or on the lam trying to avoid.  Of course in some movies it was because they were Jewish trying to escape the NAZIs.

Now being a naive American who lived in a land where we were free and allowed to have privacy I didn't think those words would ever be something to worry about in this country.

Of course I knew that in certain situations you had to provide IDs, such as if you were pulled over while operating a vehicle either recklessly or too fast and entering or leaving the country, but not say driving between two states or just walking down the street.

Now I've grown less naive over the years but I also think we as a country have grown more suspicious.

I learned that people who looked Mexican could be required to show their green cards.  Since I never had any such thing I wondered how people born here got past that.

Then we started stop and frisk in some cities where ordinary citizens, some of whom might be up to no good could be stopped and required to prove they weren't?  We were getting closer to some of those old films, if not actually there.

Then we started to make people trying to exercise their fundamental right to vote jump through hoops to prove they had that right. 

This was pretty much all the way there.

Now Texas is allowing their state police to stop anyone and prove citizenship.

The scary movie scene has now become real, at least in some places.

Hell we might start asking people who buy dangerous weapons to prove they are sane soon.