Just Mind Your Own Business! - Capitol Hill Coffee House

Doesn't that just bring back memories? Your brother was secretly slipping his peas to the dog under the dinner table; or your sister was making out in the park with her clandistine boyfriend; or your cousin was eating earthworms in the backyard. Breathless with the power to wreak destruction, you ran to your parents or teacher or other authority figure, eagar to tattle.

And what were you told? "You just mind your own business, young man..." Chastised, you shrank into the background to lick your wounded pride.

Maturing is like that. Through trial and error and faux pax, one learns the difference between the need to assert, and the social need to stay out of other people's private matters.

It's a complex set of unwritten rules learned by trial and error. Everywhere one finds people making poor choices, acting badly, doing themselves or others a hurt. Mostly they are to be ignored...because it's none of your business. There are exceptions to this, such as when a child is endangered or when someone is putting others at actual physical risk. But mostly, in a free society, everyone is to be left to work out his own destiny.

But that concept of live-and-let-live is under fire, has been for some time now...and the usual set of suspects, our keepers in government, are at the bottom of it.

It started long ago with "helmet laws" written to protect motorcyclists...from their own, presumably wrongheaded, wishes. It carried on with such government "help" as the Food Pyramid, constructed to help us benighted peons eat properly, and carried on to Bicycle Helmet laws, the National Speed Limit of 55 miles per hour, "Hate-Speech" legislation and the like.

And then mandatory Safety Belt Use traffic legislation...which was passed in Ohio, as in many other states, with the promise that it would never, EVER be the primary basis for traffic stops or used to generate revenue.

Now this:

News item: Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich ordered state police to cease using night vision to stop motorists for not wearing seat belts. (Associated Press, 6/6/2005)

Police state, meet Nanny State.

The United States is, or once was, a singular place. In virtually all of the world, the idea of the police battalion knocking on the door generated fear and terror, the promise of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Suicide, there on the spot, is often a reasonable, thoughtful alternative. What lay ahead for such unfortunates frequently includes dungeonlike incarceration, a star-chamber tribunal, and a summary sentence - frequently a capital one.

Not here. As every first-grader has been taught, the policeman is our friend. He's likely to be a boy from the neighborhood...you drank beer with his dad, you know his kids. When he's at your door it's because you called for him - something is wrong and he's here to help you.

That's the way it was intended, from the creation of the Union. Most power, including virtually all criminal law, was vested at the state or local level. This was precicely to prevent the institution of a reign of terror - to place power at low levels, where citizen control and input could counter it.

And where local sensibilities were respected. If New York wanted to legalize abortion; and Idaho wanted to make it a capital crime, that was in keeping with the structure of our union. Criminal law was the province of the soverign States; reflecting the desires of the voting citizen - who was intended to be ultimately soverign.

Alas, our keepers have found ways around this obstacle in their quest for the Perfect Society. It started with Federal monies to aid in law enforcement...whereas the wise and powerful Federal Government first takes money directly from the citizen, in an abuse of the Income Tax code, and then passes it back to the local and state agencies. In an apparent windfall gift.

And then, as with all such gifts, it starts adding strings.

The first such naked attempts were in the age of the allegedly fuel-saving National Speed Limit, where states were threatened with removal of their money-fix unless they instituted high-percentage compliance. This continues, with Clean Air standards, with Federal standards on everything from consumer products like gasoline; to child-welfare authorities and hate-speech ordinances; to trigger-lock gun laws and dozens of other regulations.

Once, long ago, there were such things as moral-social suasions, as a way to influence behavior. Some behaviors were see as "good," laudable, to be encouraged. Some were accepted as normal and went unremarked.

Some were considered annoying, and were met with shunning, with gossip and namecalling. Others were offensive enough to merit confrontation. And of course, the worst of these, murder, assault, theft or destruction of property, were labeled criminal.

This was the progression..but.liberals have no respect for any sort of suasion other than the law. If it's not illegal, it should be celebrated; and conversely, if some people are bothered by it, then it should be made illegal. Moral standards or social pressures are not part of their worldview.

At the same time the Imperial Court was finding a "right to privacy" which covered, not your computer hard-drive nor your gun cabinet, but your daughter's right to terminate her ill-concieved fetus's life, it has been cracking down on your choice to wear or not wear automobile safety belts; or to hire or not hire members of sanctioned minorities; to say or not say ethnic jokes or derrogatory remarks, to spank or to reason with your two-year-old. There is, in their view, only one right way to live - their way - and they stand ready to promote it, not with persuasion but with the power of the State.

In their quest for the Perfect Society, liberal legislators and liberal jurists, while excusing cold-blooded murder by perps who hadn't reached an arbitrarily-defined age of "adulthood," have criminalized personal choices and private behaviors which, while traditional in America, are odious to their peculiar understanding of how citizens should act and choose and live and interact.

Here we have killers excused from their acts because of administrative variances; while police stage surveillance on large numbers of possible violators - of busybodytraffic laws. Laws not enacted by the consent of the populace; but instead ordered from on high...from a faceless, unanswerable bureaucracy.

Here we have, not only behaviors proscribed by law, but mandatory types of conduct...where not only does the law tell you what you must NOT do, but what you MUST do, what you MUST choose and say and admit to.

Not to prevent injury or deception. No...it's done for your own good, and to prevent the hurt feelings of others.

It's long past time to assert our OWN rights. "States' Rights" has become a dirty phrase, due to generations of liberal miseducation...but the abuses of centralized, unaccountable power has become more egregious than anything ever done in Mobile or Selma or Topeka.

It is past time. In an era where the extralegal Supreme Court is defecating on the plain wording of the Constitution its members took an oath to preserve, it is time to assert the rights of the States; of local control; of the citizen; and to call the Federal Goverment - all three branches of it - to account for its intrusive, unlawful action.

It must start with State governments and individual legislators. And their actions and selection start with us, the voters...as we support and encourage their actions to curb the bureaucracy and remove rogue jurists.

It's our business now. Our representatives, our proxies, have so far failed us.

In the sunshine on Bestor Plaza, Chautauqua, New York

June 26, 2005

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JustPassinThru is a non de plume for a blue-collar middle-class Everyman, who lives and works in the Midwest

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