Rob's Soapbox Archives |
October 19th, 2009 LET MY PEOPLE GO “When the speed limit was raised from 55 mph to 70 mph, incidents of aggressive driving dropped to zero.” Imagine that…raising a speed limit actually reduced road rage. Sometimes common sense comes in the most obvious forms. "The low speed limit frustrated many drivers, so they drove over the speed limit. This caused problems for other drivers who were driving at the limit. The speed differential caused the tailgating, passing, and speeding that were reported as 'aggressive' driving," The above quotes are from a lieutenant with the Michigan State police. They have tried various things to quell road rage in the state with the highest unemployment rate and a whole bunch of pent up rage. The only thing that seems to provide an obvious and overwhelming cause and effect has been removing restraints from people. In other words, it is time to let us go. Enough is enough. We’ve tried it your way, behavior police, and your way has failed. Your good intentions are not producing results and we’ve had it. Take back your red light cameras, your taxes on soda, your limits on purchases of Sudafed, your desire to make us register our purchases of ammunition, your restrictions on free speech via unconstitutional “hate speech laws,” and your proposed limits on how much electricity we can use in our own homes. Take it all back…it’s a behavior police liquidation sale! Everything must go! Unshackle us and let us be free to make decisions you may not like, for the outcomes may in fact be better; which, of course is the problem. The behavior police don’t want to stop car accidents and road rage, they want you to behave in the exact same way they demand that you do. The behavior police don’t want you to drive 70 miles per hour because they think it’s too fast, period. They just can’t imagine that most of us can drive that speed safely…yet, when an entire state proves it to be true that most of us not only can drive that fast safely but that it also makes us happier to do so, that just further enrages the behavior police. It doesn’t mollify them, it makes them angrier! How dare we use our freedom to choose to drive faster and do so safely and happily! Such independence and contentment will not stand! It is time to rise up, my people! Demand your individualism once again. Shout from the highest mountaintop that you are not a child and that you can make your own decisions. Insist that bars be allowed to remain open for 24 hours per day, demand that laws prohibiting smoking in open areas like parks and beaches be rescinded and never again allow someone to tell you when you can water your lawn or how much water pressure you can have in your own showerhead. Enough is enough. No more mandatory anything, damn it. If people feel safer and more comfortable driving without a seat belt, let them. Stupidity is not a crime, it’s a God given right. You have the right in America to make stupid decisions. Let us. No more helmet laws for adults on motorcycles or kids on bikes. No more dopey restrictions or bans on cell phones and/or texting while driving. It’s unenforceable and grounded in fascism. People are going to text while they are driving and they are stupid and a danger to all of us for doing so. Welcome to life; you can’t control other people you can only control yourself and how you react to others. Once again we have stumbled upon the real problem. In America, you can’t control other people. Sadly, that is simply no longer accepted as a truth and a given in this nation. It should be, but it isn’t. Our laws were never designed to control people, but rather to provide and allow them the freedom to make their own choices, and when they make idiotic or dangerous decisions, punish and deter them. No one ever thought we would stop murder by making it illegal. The design was to capture and punish those who still killed and hopefully deter others from even trying it. That was always the common sense motive, but we have no more common sense now. We now actually and wrongly believe that we can prevent bad things from happening. We’ve tried every unconstitutional thing we could think of to stop drunken driving, from DUI checkpoints to holding bartenders legally and financially accountable for how much their customers drink to sin taxes on liquor to breathalyzers in cars…and none of it has come close to making an impact. Drinking and driving is still, 30 years after MADD was founded, an epidemic in America and it always will be. Specious claims of improved enforcement have been proven false and we all know now what MADD’s true goal is; prohibition. Once again, their discomfort with decisions made by a free people are forcing them to control our behavior. Multiple forces and motivations and congregated together to limit us in all that we do, but most notably it is the demand that people make identical choices and the inability to accept life’s unfairness. Death happens; people die; it is awful and hurtful and at times unexplainable but it is also inevitable. Often times totally innocent people die at the hands of the careless and there is nothing that can be done to prevent or even lessen such occurrences as proven time and time again by the fact that behavior controls don’t actually effect outcomes. While seat belts have saved countless lives, the ratio and percentage of auto accidents has actually increased since we enacted seat belt laws. These examples exist in every form; bike helmets for kid, gun restrictions and control laws, DUI checkpoints and the like have all done effective nothing to stop or limit what we were told they would; not if you’re intellectually honest about the truth, that is. In other words, people will find a way to die and be killed. In the end, behavior police demand that they be judged on intentions not on results for they must since their results are putrid. What they don’t understand is that their intentions are not as pure as they would have us believe. In fact, their intentions are of the mindset of the greatest villains of our planet’s history; they demand that we all look, act, think and behave in the exact same way. They want to strip us all of our individuality in the name of the greater good and create a society of followers, with only they, the almighty behavior police as the leaders. We will eat what they tell us we can, go where they tell us we can in the fashion they deem appropriate and we will speak in a way only acceptable to them. Those are not the intentions of the innocent, those are the motivations of the most vile type of human; they are soul-less and they must be stopped.
|