Bearded Rock Band Hassled by Florida Cops for Seeming Terrorist-y or Something

It’s a tough time for concerned, law-abiding, fear-addled citizens around the country. Everyone is on high alert for potential terrorist plots, which, as Dick Cheney will tell you, are definitely around the corner and coming any day now. But it’s not so easy to see something and say something anymore given current fashion trends, which have confounded our God-given rights as Americans to judge people based on their sartorial and grooming choices.

Used to be back in the good old days when things were simple, and America was America, (if you know what I mean), that you could take stock of a man by the length of his beard; Bill O’Reilly determining that Bowe Bergdahl‘s father was a Muslim based simply on the length of his chin whiskers, for example. Now that’s just common sense.

Times have changed, however. Now every time you see a man with a lengthy beard you have to play a quick game of “Terrorist, Hipster, or Red Neck?” before making the right choice to either call the police, or minding your own business and, well, who knows what could happen then? 9/11 II probably. That’s the gamble a St. Petersburg, Florida man took on Saturday when he observed a nefarious group of beard-sporting vaguely Muslim-seeming men loading equipment into a van.

Creative Loafing detailed the plot, which reads like a hair-raising episode of 24:

According to the police report, neighbor Keith Coleman noticed two male and two female 20somethings he’d never seen in the neighborhood before at [rock promoter Kat] Lynes’ apartment. They were packing up a blue and grey van with Nevada license plates. One of the men, he told police, had a “full bushy beard,” and both had “Middle Eastern appearances.” They were carrying heavy black and red backpacks, and cardboard boxes marked with red X’s that had the word “explosives” on them, according to Coleman.

They didn’t respond to Coleman’s friendly, neighborly greeting, the type you used to be able to do when communities were tight knit and wholesome, (if you know what I mean), so he called it in to the police, as you do, then rested easy knowing he’d done his duty as an unofficial neighborhood watchmen. You might call him a hero. Or you would, if he hadn’t actually narced on the Reno-based rock band The Vampirates loading equipment into their van after a gig.

What of the boxes though? Surely they were filled with explosives, like they said on the outside, because the world is a cartoon.

Actually, it was just band merch.

The subsequent police search was “pretty ridiculous,” the band’s David Masud said, which, Masud? Come on, are we sure here? (If you know what I mean).

“We’re pretty alternative-looking people, but we’re not terrorists.”

That’s not what people said after listening to their record, am I right!?

I kid the Vampirates, they’re actually pretty viscerally abrasive, but energetic punk rock. Music aside, they’ve often joked that bearded bassist Pat Mayfield was going to be profiled one of these days.

It’s something that I can relate to myself, as someone in possession of a large, unruly beard. I can’t remember a time when I’ve gone through airport security where I wasn’t given an extra once over, or had to field questions about my beard. The trick, in my case, is to also have a bunch of really crappy tattoos, which usually tends to place people like myself squarely in the hipster segment of the holy trinity of beard-havers.

“This is just about people being more scared of each other than they should be,” Masud told Creative Loafing.

And by this I think he means literally every aspect of the American judicial and law enforcement systems.

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>> Luke O’Neil is a journalist and blogger in Boston. Follow him on Twitter (@lukeoneil47).

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.