Activists Demand AMBER Alert Changed to PAT | Satire Saturday

Progressives have discovered the real problem with the AMBER Alert: Amber.

In this Satire Saturday episode, an entirely imaginary government committee reviews the alert system—not to determine whether it works, but whether its language is harmful.

“Kidnapped” assigns blame. “Girl” assumes gender. “Blue Honda” imposes your perception onto the vehicle. The abductor becomes an “unlicensed transportation provider,” the missing child becomes a “participant with incompletely documented enthusiasm,” and her photograph is replaced by an inclusive gray oval.

Then the committee unveils its replacement:

PAT — Person Absent Temporarily.

Unfortunately, nobody says the acronym aloud until after the letterhead, training materials, awards and lanyards have already been printed.

And then someone remembers Pat from Saturday Night Live.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Why Amber fails the government’s cultural vibe check
• “They didn’t fight the kidnapping. They fought the noun.”
• The unlicensed transportation provider—an Uber with a warrant
• “Not every missing person identifies as found”
• How the missing child becomes a gray oval
• PAT meets Pat from Saturday Night Live
• The emergency alert that reads, “Someone may be somewhere with somebody in something”
• How PAT becomes PA—and then simply P
• The language police finally arrest themselves

This episode is satire. The committee, report and PAT proposal are fictional. Amber Hagerman—and the emergency alert system created in her memory—were real.

CHAPTERS

00:00 AMBER Is Now “Problematic”
01:57 When Emergency Language Becomes Useless
08:20 The Language Police Arrest Themselves

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00:00 AMBER Is Now “Problematic”
01:57 When Emergency Language Becomes Useless
08:20 The Language Police Arrest Themselves

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

America activists want to rename the Amber Alert. Not fix it. Rename it. Because Amber is too white, too female, too suburban. And the committee found suspiciously gemstone forward. This is the system that finds kidnapped children. No children have been found this week. But the branding is coming along beautifully. And before anybody emails me, this report is fictional. Which is how you know the federal government hasn't spent $14 million on it yet. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, and this is Common Sense. Satire Saturday edition. It started with a committee. It always starts with a committee. The entirely imaginary interagency working group on emergency terminology, IWGET, pronounced I get, which was flagged as presumptuous. But hold on to that. These are people about to name something. Keep in mind their assignment was not to fix the amber alert. Their assignment was to review it for harm. Different department. 18 months of meetings about a system that finds missing children. They found none. Wasn't the assignment. What they found was the word amber. Amber is gendered. Amber is feminine coated. Amber is white adjacent. It's a color. Being next to other colors is the whole job. Amber is also a gemstone, which our imaginary report calls gemstone privilege. Fossilized tree sap, living too well. Then Amber tested suburban. They ran a cultural association review. It came back wine fridge, wall art, target, live, laugh, love. They ran a name through a vibe check. A murdered nine-year-old's name came back basic. Amber also sits between yellow and orange, which troubled them because neither color was consulted. Somebody get orange on the phone. Twenty-two meetings, four working groups, 47 tote bags. And somewhere in there, Denise from Community Language Compliance raised her hand and she said she wanted to create space around whether the child necessarily wanted to be located. And nobody threw a chair. That is where civilization failed. But here's the finding. Here's the one. The system is named for a real little girl from Texas in 1996, nine years old, taken out of her own neighborhood and killed. And ever since her name has been the thing that goes looking for everyone else's kid. The committee's position? Naming a national system after a single individual centers on one narrative. Centers a narrative. That's what we're calling her now. They didn't fight the kidnapping. They fought the noun. All right. Name's gone. Now the sentence. The original alert said nine-year-old girl kidnapped in a blue Honda, westbound on I-20. Sixteen words, give or take. Everybody in three counties knows what happened and what to look for. The committee read those 16 words and saw 16 emergencies. Girl, that assumes gender. Kidnapped assigns blame. Blue imposes your perception onto the Honda. Nine-year-old? But age is fluid. Westbound presumes intent. He took a child in a Honda. I'm okay with presuming intent. And I-20 excludes Americans who identify as frontage road curious. So the girl became a person of developmentally evolving age. Nine syllables to avoid saying girl. The man who took her became an unlicensed transportation provider. That's an Uber with a warrant. And she became a participant with incompletely documented enthusiasm. A participant? In what? Where's the sign-up sheet? Rescue went to. Rescue implies a hierarchy of competence. It sure does. That's the entire point of a rescue. Even alert didn't survive. Alert assumes something is wrong, and wrong is judgment. So it became a notice. But a notice expects the public to notice, and noticing is surveillance, so it became an update. Your kid is gone, and the government is sending you an update. And that sound, the one that stops your heart at two in the morning, got flagged as sonically aggressive. It's now a tone the documentation describes as more inviting. And you can swipe it away without reading it to protect you from an unconsented emotional experience. So the alert is optional now. And then the line that ended me, not every missing person identifies as found. Somebody typed that. With a cursor blinking at them, and nobody in that building stopped. Forty minutes later, the approved version read, Someone may be experiencing transportation. Perfectly inclusive. Completely useless. Then they got to the photograph. Can't use it. She never consented to the distribution of her likeness. So they drew an illustration. The illustration depicted a body type. So they simplified the illustration. It's now a gray oval. The missing child is a shape. We have alerted the nation to a shape. No age either. Age is fluid. No description. That's appearance-based bias. No plate for privacy, his privacy. We are protecting the data of the guy in the car. And nobody asks to be on the lookout because looking closely at strangers is surveillance. The approved instruction is if you notice something, first consider what your noticing says about you. So now they need a name. Here's how they got one, and this is my favorite part. They didn't pick one. They deleted every word they'd banned. Child missing, abducted, parent, rescue, alert, and three words survived. Person absent temporarily. P A T. Oh, this is spectacular. And nobody noticed for 11 days. Letterhead, laminated training materials, an award, lanyards, 22 meetings, four working groups, a federal budget, and not one person in that room ever said it out loud. Somewhere there is a man named Doug who proposed person absent temporarily, drove home, and told his wife he'd had a good day. Then the intern asked whether Pat was that gender ambiguous character from Saturday Night Live, and 40 federal employees simultaneously experienced the first original thought of their careers. For anybody under 40, Pat was a character on Saturday Night Live in the early 90s, whose entire joke was that nobody could tell whether Pat was a man or a woman for four years and a movie. They canceled Amber for being too gendered and replaced her with the one person in American history whose whole job was making everybody ask, is that a man or a woman? That is not irony. That is government efficiency to a T. Their clarification in full quote, Pat is not Pat. Any resemblance to Pat is coincidental. Continued discussion of Pat distracts from Pat. That is a legal disclaimer for a comedy character from 1992. Then somebody explained to 1992 to human resources, and suddenly Pat wasn't gender neutral. Pat was a federal workplace incident, so they canceled Amber for being too gendered, and now they have to cancel Pat for not being gendered correctly. The ruling came down. Pat may be written, not pronounced. So they spelled it out loud, PAT, which produces Pat. So the name became three seconds of silence, except federal rules require the alert to be audible. So the silence has to be announced. The announcement runs 11 seconds. You cannot run an emergency broadcast on a word you are not allowed to broadcast. So they shipped it. At two in the morning, every phone in Texas received this emergency message. Someone may be somewhere with somebody in something. That is not an Amber alert. That is the plot of every Liam Neeson movie. Four indefinite pronouns wearing a lanyard. It describes every human being alive, three people in witness protection, and most of Congress. The grammar was flawless. The kid was in Oklahoma. Then it multiplied. The kidnapper is an unlicensed transportation provider, person assisting transportation, Pat. The mother is an individual awaiting return. Person awaiting them.

unknown 7:36

Pat.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So Texas received Pat is asking the public to help locate Pat, who was last seen traveling with Pat. Somebody asked, which Pat? The written response. The question assumes Pat's are distinguishable. Meanwhile, every American named Pat got that alert at two in the morning with their own name in it. 911 took 400 calls in the first hour. Most were Pat's, checking whether they were actually missing. Then the complaints from people named Pat, from people formally named Pat, from people who have at some point been asked whether they are Pat, from one man who has never been called Pat in his life but wanted it on the record that he could be, and from a woman actually named Pat in Lubbock, who called to report that she was okay. She was informed that her being fine could not be confirmed at this time, then temporarily was removed because it presumed the person would come back. Pat became PA, Pennsylvania suit. So then they shortened it to P. Your phone buzzes at two in the morning and it just says P. One letter from the government at two in the morning. That's not an Amber alert. That's a ransom note that just gave up. Americans who reject the binary between present and absent were given their own working group. It has not met. Meeting implies presence. The language police arrested themselves. And then, one Tuesday, Amber quietly came back. No announcement, no apology. Pat went into a filing cabinet somewhere next to the metric system. 18 months, 22 meetings, four working groups, one gray oval. They began by erasing the name of a real murdered little girl. They ended by apologizing to a fictional person named Pat. And the alert that actually finds the children still says nine-year-old Blue Honda plate ends 447 westbound on I-20. Westbound. I said it. So come and get me. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, and this has been Satire Saturday. God bless you, President Reagan. And as always, may God save America.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

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