A few weeks back, around three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, I was getting ready to turn onto the one way street leading into Downtown Albuquerque. There was a bit of a commotion on the street, some honking and stopped cars. Was there an accident?

I couldn't tell what was happening until I got on the road myself and saw the truck everyone was unhappy about. It could not stay in one lane, it was going very slow, but still driving down (mostly in the right direction) the road. I got around it and, while waiting for a light further down the road, hoped the truck would not slowly plow into my stationary car. I watched the proceedings behind me in my rearview mirror out of the corner of my eye. I saw the truck cross lanes in front of other cars, run up onto a curb, get back into the street and keep going, blocking two lanes at a time and frustrating motorists.

I'd never seen such a clear signal of a drunk driver.

A few weeks earlier, the state began running ads about a hotline you could call in to inform police about drunk drivers. They showed a couple of young men sneaking drinks in their car, and an older couple looking like pissed off grandparents calling the hotline on the scofflaws.

I don't have a cell phone, and I certainly wouldn't program a hotline for drunk drivers onto my phone if I had one. A phone line doesn't help all the cars who were inconvenience and menaced by the drunk driver I saw. That truck was being followed by friends (acting like a reverse blocker, actually), and, I hope, they convinced the driver he needed to pull off and stop driving. But, most likely, they just followed him to where they were going. I doubt if that driver was stopped and arrested for DUI. His friends should have made him leave his truck wherever they were drinking and let him sleep it off on a couch somewhere.

So what's my point, huh? What am I condoning here? Whose side am I on? What kind of bullshit liberal agenda am I pushing today?

We have become a citizenry of informants and vigilantes. At the same time, we are more and more living in a police state. How do these two things happen at the same time? If we have more and more cops, more and more laws we have to follow and virtually no way to stop search and seizure (a car with a tail light out can be searched for drugs, legally), why do the citizens have to be cops, too?

There are little ads everywhere about it. Ads telling people they'll get a reward (of up to $50K!) for turning in people who use pirated computer software. Maybe if the software didn't cost so damn much (and you didn't give narcs $50K for their information), there would be fewer software pirates.

Turn in people who download movies and music. Turn in people who buy kids beer. Call the cops about suspicious people walking around the neighborhood. Turn in suspected terrorists. Show your ID for everything (papers, please), even if you're obviously decades older than 21 and want a drink. Call cops about homeless people. Turn in suspected drunken drivers. Patrol the Mexican-American border with your rifle and drinking buddies--for sport and patriotism!

And, by the way, we need to be able to listen to everyone's phone calls (Hey, hockey players and their wives bet on sporting events--we have evidence from tapping their phones! Thank God we got to the bottom of that scandal.), read everyone's emails, hack into everyone's computers. Trace where everyone goes on the Internet. Low-jacks, drug-sniffing dogs and breath-a-lizers, oh my!

Are you going to enter the office pool and fill out a bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament this year? You will be breaking the law! The one person who doesn't join in might be a narc! He'll make more money in reward for turning you in than you'll make if you win the pool.

We've got overflowing jails and prisons, and we're making more reasons to throw people into them.

When we talk about civil liberties, people seem to think it has something to do with the 60s and free love. That any law-abiding citizen would never get caught in roving wiretaps or email webs. But giving overarching permission to look at everyone's dirty laundry makes us all dirty. Makes us all guilty and have to prove our innocence (rather than the other way around).

This means the people who can afford lawyers will be more likely to get off, but most people do not have access to good representation--guilty or not.

The American Dream is not available for everyone. It has been sold to the highest bidders. The corporations are more important than any individual citizen's rights--and the corporations are not on your side. If you choose to stay in your house and watch government sanctioned TV, then you'll be fine. But for the rest of us who are out trying to find something to believe in, well, I guess we better watch our ass. Because the life narcs are everywhere.

And they keep making living life more illegal everyday.

Matt Worley knows there will be no one left to protest when the witch hunters come for him.