Click It Or Ticket

Over the Memorial Day weekend there were several radio advertisements alerting the general public that the police would be out in full force stopping people and writing tickets if they weren’t wearing seat belts. On the surface this sounds perfectly normal; if you drive a car, the law states very clearly that you must wear a safety harness. However, let’s take a look at this situation from a different perspective…

The same weekend where the cops were telling us to click it or risk getting a ticket, there was another news story about a guy on the campus of Ohio State University that was running around raping women. There was nothing about the police being out in mass force trying to find this guy…no radio spots requesting information about this guy or a public service announcement telling women to walk in groups and be careful. No! All of the spots from the police were “Click It Or Ticket”. This is bullshit! While this rapist bastard was out harming young women and countless other actual CRIMINALS were raping, robbing and pillaging the good citizens of Columbus, our law enforcement agency was focused on giving tickets for seat belt violations. This is really screwed up on 2 levels:

First, their perspective is 180 degrees out of phase. Go get the bad guys! While you're pulling me over and writing a ticket, the guy passing by laughing at me is going to knock over a gas station. No, rob a bank! (There have been several bank robberies in Columbus lately.) Can the police actually fight crime instead of generating revenue? That's what I call them, Revenue Generators.

Second, this is yet another example of the government stripping us of our basic liberties. Since when was it the police’s job to protect me from myself?! If I don’t want to wear a seatbelt, then damnit, that’s MY business. It is the job of law enforcement to protect good citizens from bad citizens. It is NOT their job to protect me from myself! I heard a news report that some small town in Texas passed a law that you can’t smoke in your OWN house if you have children. Again, this sounds like a good thing but tell me, since when did the police have the right to burst into someone’s home just because they decide to light up a square? I’m a smoker but I choose NOT to smoke around my children. But my children don’t live with me. So, say I’m out playing with my children on my patio and the police happen by and see that I have kids. Then later on, when they go home, I’m walking in my living room with the blinds drawn smoking a square. Can the police burst into my home and give me a ticket or even worse, arrest me because my children were in my home earlier that day but aren’t now? This is preposterous and non-enforcable! But the worst part about it is, once again, this is simply Big Brother stripping away yet more of my civil liberties and it's pissing me off!

I don’t know what’s becoming of this great society…it’s gonna get so bad that I’m gonna have to pack my bags and move to Afghanistan…hell, it’s probably more free there now...

Just my thoughts…err ranting for today…