The commute in Campbell, California, collapsed into chaos today (Tuesday) when a plastic trinket—placed by a weekend treasure hunter—was mistaken for the second coming of Guy Fawkes. Winchester Boulevard turned into a no-go zone while patrol cruisers, armored vans, and an inquisitive news chopper circled the scene.
Parents ran late, businesses lost customers, and every weary taxpayer footed the bill for a few lumbering hours that felt like a bad rehearsal of Homeland Security Theater.
I happened to be stuck in it. As the O’Learys claim to be an adventuring clan, I took my children on a quest while Mom was at the dentist. It turns out that the trip to the coin-op carwash a few klicks down the road was more than we bargained for.
I told Jack Callahan about our misadventure— “twenty minutes, seven side streets, and two cranky kids just to scrub road dust and a bunch of bird crap off the Yukon” —and he barked the laugh of a man who has shoveled more bureaucratic folly than snow.
“Son,” he said over a quick Zoom, clanking a coffee mug on his desk, “they closed a principal artery because some gadgeteer dropped a glorified Tupperware? That’s not safety. That’s institutional hypochondria!”
Jack has also watched government balloon in the post-Eisenhower years. There’s an industrial complex that never knows when to stand down. Whose folks haven’t regaled them about the drills of the 1950s and 60s—kids ducking under desks, generals measuring fallout with slide rules, mothers praying the Cubans would blink first in the nuclear standoff?
Back then, Jack argued, they served a palpable dread: Soviet warheads. Today, the danger is a nylon box with a smiley-face sticker.
Across the nation, bomb squads sprint to geocaches with the reflex of Pavlov’s dog, racking up overtime and wear on six-figure robots. Technicians detonated a pipe-shaped cache near a middle school in Frisco, Colorado. Officers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, x-rayed a “Pipe Bomb Geocache” in a Home Depot lot. Ohio wardens evacuated hikers for a plastic LocknLock that did nothing but hide a logbook.
Each scare drains finite manpower. Colorado again: Summit County’s sheriff lamented “a significant amount of time and valuable resources” burned on harmless PVC.
Last week in Door County, Wisconsin, deputies cleared an entire park for a GPS game piece.
Consider. A single response truck runs nearly $200k—forget sirens and strobing lights. Regional squads log 40–60 callouts per year, and Santa Clara County’s unit stands ready 24/7 for three neighboring counties. Meanwhile, local police budgets groan under the bloat of overtime—New York alone projects $507 million in uniform OT this fiscal year.
Jack’s verdict: “They buy a bazooka to swat a housefly, then pass the invoice to the housefly.”
The Founders believed liberty survives only where citizens and the state maintain proportion. Yet modern officialdom multiplies protocols the way kudzu chokes a fenceline. One errant cache and the default is “cordon-and-search.”
Reflect. During World War II, explosives were shipped across the continent without paralyzing traffic. Today, a plastic box is enough to darken countless traffic lights.
Jack thundered: “We lock down, we clear out, we pay up—yet we never wise up.”
The pattern mirrors Prohibition raids and TSA shoe shuffling: bold headlines first, sheepish footnotes later. Fear becomes currency, and compliance turns into habit.
No one begrudges caution—real threats exist, as Oklahoma City proved in 1995. But prudence must share the stage with perspective. Ground rules already tell geocachers to avoid pipes, military ammo cans, and public transit pylons. Enforcing amateur guidelines would cost pennies compared with mobilizing the paramilitary.
Callahan frames it in boxing terms: “Government should fight in its weight class. Right now, it’s shadow-boxing ghosts, burning stamina while real crooks pick pockets in the bleachers.”
His prescription is surgical: Dispatchers must first cross-reference geocache databases; Hobbyists should plainly label containers; Open civilian hotlines to resolve benign sightings before alarms spread like prairie fire.
Today’s fiasco was a bureaucratic belly flop, not a public triumph. It showcased an apparatus that mistakes activity for achievement, then invoices Ordinary Joe for its blunders. Each lockdown chips away at civic patience, the same way price controls bred gas lines and sour distrust.
Jack tells me he’s going to raise one up tonight—Bud Heavy bottle, label out—and toast to the folks like me who were stuck in their noontime commute: “May your engines stay cool, may your kids forgive the delay, and may your public servants learn that discernment is cheaper than spectacle.”
After all, the republic Jack’s ancestors bled for was forged on measured courage, not reflexive dread. Until our institutions remember that distinction, every plastic lunchbox will parade as Armageddon.
At the same time, the real business of the nation waits at the barricade, honking its horn.
This article was originally published on The O’Leary Review.
