On Sunday we went to the 31st Annual Takoma Park Folk Festival a couple of miles from our house. Takoma Park is the Berkeley-Park Slope-Ann Arbor-Madison-Austin-etc. of Maryland. An enclave that takes pride in community so strongly that the recycling instructions are 10 pages, complete with notes making sure you know that they have had a manual since 1993 with original information from even earlier publications produced in Berkeley. That is how deep the caring goes.
The festival has a nice crafts section as well as a lot of tables set up by about 100 community groups, but the main feature is seven stages of music. For added excitement they put the children’s stage every year in the Grassy Nook, which features poison ivy.
As we sat down on the grass I noticed a man who seemed somewhat angry and out of place. He was wearing a sunvisor and wraparound glasses and was fairly clean cut. He clearly was not there for the music or crafts. And then I noticed that he had his video camera pointing backwards under his arm and he was tapping his visor near his right temple periodically. It was creepy to realize he was filming people behind him and possibly recording conversations.
As a parent I first watched to see that he was not filming children. He was following specific people — mainly the more hippy-ish people in the crowd. I thought he might be undercover law enforcement, as the Washington Post recently had an article about the police infiltrating and spying on Takoma Park anti-war groups. But this guy was too obvious or sloppy to be an officer, yet no one else seemed to notice. He was so into his surveillance that he did not notice me take a few pictures of him in the act.
I looked around for a police officer but none were nearby. What he was doing was probably not illegal and he was probably just some sort of vigilante, and not the type of person to confront.
What should I have done?
One Response to “Surveilling the Hippies?”
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Have Clementine sing anchors away!