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David Benton's letter hits the nail on the head. Railfans are citizens like others. They have rights to vote by choice, to spend or save, to have families or stay single, to be soldiers or civilians, to claim civil liberties and to guarantee these to others. In short, they are normal. Now, the local agents of police and other authorities are not always very wise, nor are they always well informed. They may be easily manipulated to become agents of repression, starting the slippery slope towards the totalitarianism you properly fear. We throughout the non-US western world fear that the Iraq campaign, the political and military preparations, and the use of dis-information are all part of a program which is not democratically founded, and which has been carried through without a basis of international law (i.e. it is an illegal act of a small number of persons around the President, who have used their authority to create an atmosphere of fear and intolerance within the USA). Truth is then a major casualty, and a close neighbour of this is repression of non-conformist attitudes and behaviour. Railfans, I regret to suspect, probably come into that category: why aren't they at the ball game instead of standing waiting for freight trains in the desert! Totalitarian states of course need bruisers and 'rednecks' to carry out their dirty work, as indeed Saddam Hussein has known for some years. The future is therefore unpromising, at least as long as the present White House administration believes it can ignore ethics, morality and international law in pursuing its own agenda, and to justify this uses the same manipulations as Huxley or Orwell parodied before them: the image of an external enemy is conjured up to justify repressive and manipulative measures at home. I have cancelled my US trip planned for the summer. I cannot feel free travelling in a land whose leader ignores international law, and binding contractual obligations such as the United Nations Charter, to conduct a war of aggression no better than those he himself calls 'evil'. Believe me, although this does not get through at present in US media, the immense and continuing protests in almost all states of the developed world show how widely this view is shared, that the leadership of the USA has, for reasons which are not really clear, embarked upon an unconstitutional and immoral campaign based upon a 'security' paranoia. This allows no place for me standing in the sunshine photographing trains. I will follow you through 'Trains', with love and interest, and hope you will flourish and survive in proper well-informed constitutional freedom. The fight for that is now probably not only in the Persian Gulf, but at home. Wouldn't it be great if railfans headed up a fight for civil liberties and a well-ordered society?
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