I recently met Brooke Oberwetter, who has become known as the Jefferson 1. She seems like a nice, unassuming person and we had a pleasant conversation, which is why I was surprised to learn that she was facing criminal charges. I have come to believe that her arrest is an excellent example of the war on the unexpected.

She and around 20 of her friends went to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by silently dancing and listening to music with earphones of some kind. Surely this is not a usual occurrence and the park police were not expecting 20 people to show up and silently dance around in the middle of the night. However, she was not breaking any laws and she certainly wasn’t terrorizing anything.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it because there’s three videos on YouTube that show the event in detail. This incident happens to be getting a lot of publicity because of the circumstances: a young blond woman, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, the video footage of the event, the fact that all the participants were active in libertarian politics.

If this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you, I am not surprised. Violations of civil liberties rarely seem like that big of a deal to the unaffected. The unaffected are, by definition, not directly affected by events like this. Mistakes are made. Police officers are human just like everyone else, but we all lose something when citizens in our country are wrongfully arrested or detained. This event may be useful in illuminating the broader point: the war on the unexpected is a massive waste of time and money — how can we fix this?

That’s certainly something to think about.