It's true. Closed. But only to pedestrians. And only at some unspecified time that includes the awesome pre-dawn light.
Maybe it's not always closed.
I went over there the other day, determined to use my camera to capture something other than simple snapshots. I drove across the causeway in a caravan of pickup trucks whose owners were going to work. I parked my car in one of the empty lots and walked back down to the walkway that goes across the dam.
More of this story after the jump.
Turns out that here's another place that the terrorists have won (twitter hash #amillionlittlewaystheterroristswon - invented just for the purpose of mini-rants) in our country. I could have tossed out some TNT like in the cartoons, or blown up my car on the causeway or simply stopped in traffic and walked away or anything else, but walking (on foot) carrying a tiny camera bag was strictly prohibited. Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that a bridge that I pay for with my taxes is guarded by douche-y, trigger-happy cops ("That's what the cones are for", huh? You mean the single cone? The one that has no real significance? Yeah, fuck you.) that don't have any idea why they're stopping you ("terro-ists!!!!!!!!!"). Let's ignore that a nice lawsuit insisting on returning me access to MY OWN SHIT would lose because our justice system is more terrified of losing their corporate kickbacks than of an ignorant, complacent populace, or the fact that we could class-action it into a suit with 300 million plantifs, and focus on how fucking silly it is to not let me walk onto the causeway.
Like Randall says over at XKCD, you could over-volt and then poke a hole a battery that's allowed on every flight it could easily bring down the plane. Instead of focusing on early detection of candidates, they're trying to patch holes as they find them. Sounds frighteningly like our healthcare system. And Ben Franklin said the thing about the prevention and the cure 250ish years ago. Motherfuckers.
Anyway, I'm really mad that they wouldn't let me walk out onto the Hoover Dam to take pictures at dawn, not least because I got up at like 5 after a bunch of drinks the night before and wasted a bunch of $3/gallon gas to get there.
This post isn't leading anywhere except to say that fuck reacting out of fear because we're not smart enough to be proactive and come up with new solutions to the new problems that we face.