The Tattle-Tale Virus

by Will Grigg
Jan. 22, 2014

Under totalitarian regimes like those that afflicted East Germany and Communist Cuba, citizens were expected and required to inform on each other. Too many Americans have embraced this mindset and eagerly look for excuses to turn in their neighbors. The tattle-tale impulse can sometimes be expressed in amazingly petty ways.

In Lee's Summit, Missouri, an anonymous complaint drew the attention of city officials to a fort that had been constructed by a group of local children in a vacant lot. The kids had used scraps left over from local construction projects. A resident spied the fort and, acting in the best tradition of East German civic duty, filed a complaint with the building code bureaucracy.

The children and their parents assembled for a pizza party to celebrate completion of the fort, and then watched as bulldozers were used to tear down the harmless but unauthorized edifice. One parent told a local TV news reporter that her six-year-old was so upset that she wanted to move to a different city.

While this child's disgusted outrage is understandable, it's likely that she couldn't find a community in the United States whose population hasn't been infected with the tattle-tale virus.