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I’ve touched before on a basic piece of philosophy that I came to understand a few years back and I would like to revisit it today.

That is...

Every law, statute, code, ordnance, rule, or regulation that any government entity enacts has a man with a gun at the end of it.

Example: you don’t pay your taxes, they send you a letter. You ignore that, they send a summons. You ignore that, they come by for a visit. You then tell them to "piss-off", and they come back with the sheriff or SWAT team (men with guns) and when you resist, they use ‘em. Whether you want to admit it to or not everything comes down to that. From car insurance to a dog license; you push hard enough and they’ll kill you - or at the very least, beat you into submission. Authority only has power when it is backed up with threat of violence, and as I’ve said before, there are very few things in life that are so important to me that I fell the need to put a gun to some ones head about it. So, why is it O.K. for the masses to appoint mercenaries to go out and threaten people into wearing their seat-belts? It’s not - and most people know it’s not.

The reason I’m ranting about this again is because of a recent article I read printed in the Arizona Republic titled "Couple cited for Christmas lights see charge as humbug" (look it up at ‘arizonarepublic.com’.) Apparently Tony and Angelica Flores had violated a "code" requiring all Christmas decorations to be removed by January, 13 - 19 days after Christmas day. Mrs. Flores states that her husband had been injured at work and she was afraid to climb a ladder - that’s why the lights were still up in April. The Flores’ went to court twice and didn’t show up for a third set court date when they received a letter telling them the case had been dropped. Of course that stream-lined, well-oiled machine we call government somehow still managed to issue a bench warrant for a ‘failure to appear’, which led to three officers showing up at their new house in a different town, handcuffing them, and carting them away. In other words, they were arrested for not removing their Christmas decorations.

I’d like to approach this from a few different angles. Such as: did the city council define "Christmas decorations"? I mean, some people put those plastic snowmen in their front yards, now what if your kids build a snowman on January 14th? Will they be carted off too, or will that only happen if they put a Santa hat on it? How about those evergreens in your yard? Perhaps you should break out the chain saw now before the "aesthetics police" decide they look a bit too festive. And what about the ever popular manger scene? Is it not your right to practice your religion 365 days a year, or is it just from the Friday after Thanksgiving to January 13th? Then there is the problem of the Madonna (not the singer) statues in the yards of so many of our Catholic friends. Let’s face it, she gave birth to Jesus - she was there. A statue of her might just remind people of Christmas and we can’t have that, so they gotta go to I guess. Unless. . . . let’s see. . . . the average manger scene consists of the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, three wise men, three shepherds, and a couple of angels ( I’ll leave the sheep and camels out for now.) So that’s 11 faux-entities - Mary being one-eleventh of that total sum. So, as a compromise maybe the city officials could pass a "one-eleventh rule", where one out of eleven Christmas related decorations may remain up, and if you choose the "Blessed Virgin" as yours, that’s your business. After all, it’s a free country. That sounds about as logical as any other arbitrary crap-ola rule those type of idiots usually come up with, right?

I know what your thinking, you think this is about those annoying "lights" your neighbor is too lazy to take down off of his garage. Well what if it is? If I choose to put colored lights on my house in the middle of summer, what do you care? Maybe I just like lights, or maybe my life is so good I feel like every day is Christmas. It should be socially acceptable anyway since retailers start stocking the shelves with said decorations in July. How about if I go by the new "one-eleventh" rule? I’ll make sure only one in eleven of the bulbs on any given string of lights is working at any given time. Or, I could put up11 strings of lights and take 10 of them down right away, how’s that?

And why just Christmas decorations? Why not Chanukah? I can hear it now - "Get that menorah out of the front window please you’re drivin’ down the property values, and I’d better not see that ‘Stars and Stripes’ up after July 17th either!" O.K., last one - can I refrain from putting up anything during Christmas, but instead wait until April, and if so at what point does my 19 day removal period start?

Are you starting to see where these types of things lead? When you allow the busy-body do-gooders to start dictating pocedure for actions that have no victim it never stops, and it tends to get more outlandish with each election. You know most of these stupid laws happen just because they want it to look like they are doing something - because of that it has led to such bizarre things as "thumb-hole stocks" on rifles and ‘Material Safety Data Sheets’ for water.

Remember, these same people who sit on these county boards and city councils often continue on to occupy higher positions. The same idiot who thinks it’s a good idea to pass out taxpayer supplied condoms to 12 year-old’s may some day hold the ‘Department of Education’ cabinet position. The "Hitler Youth" passing these "decoration ordinances" may some day be senators. Now you have to ask yourself if that is who you really want in charge of the "War on Terrorism"?

Something else that you might want to consider is that if the Flores’ had attended the superbowl this year they would have been herded through a "facial recognition scanner". And if the DMV in their state uses digital photographs on the drivers licenses it would have provided a data base to cross check their photos against, which of course would have lead to their being arrested on the spot in New Orleans - outstanding warrant and all, you know. I’m sure the cost of extraditing the "felons" back to Arizona wouldn’t have even entered into it either. Can you see the irony? A city where it is legal for a woman to walk around with her tits showing, carrying open alcohol, and practicing voodoo, arresting tourists on an outstanding warrant for a "decoration violation" from their home state. Starting to get the picture? You know "THEY" are, and they’re pushing for it as fast as they can.

This is de-humanization at its worst.

You know, I’ve been watching the ‘Alan Keyes is Making Sense’ show on CNBC lately. Alan quite often makes some interesting observations, but there is something I keep hearing him harp on that is starting to bug me. It is when I hear him say "we must maintain the integrity of the law, because law is what society is based on." Now granted, I’m an anti-social type, but every time he says that I find myself saying back to the TV, "Yeh Alan, but what if the law sucks." He would most likely answer with some soliloquy about "proper procedure to repeal laws" and "redress of grievances" or maybe even admit that "once in a while even our system isn’t perfect". Isn’t perfect? Yeh, no shit Alan. You know why? Because the laws are made by humans, for humans, and enforced by humans. Add in the fact that the lazy and incompetent tend to drift towards government service and your pretty much guaranteed an eventual aneurism from "one-eleventh rule" stress build-up. And don’t even get me started about the BAR association or judges "instructing" the jury on how they must find. The phrase "den of vipers" keeps coming to mind.

Putting the law on a pedestal is about as smart as putting any human on a pedestal- it’s bound to come back and bite you. The officers arresting Mr. and Mrs. Flores put the law on a pedestal as soon as they decided to make the trip to the Flores’ home, and the "integrity of the law" was obviously more important to them than the Flores’ Constitutional rights. But their ignoring the fact that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land would actually show the officers contempt for the law. See, there we go again - enforced by humans. Humans who care more about what the "data-base" says than what the people paying their salaries do; who care more about "the Law" than they do about justice.

Like I said before . . . . de-humanization.
 

"...cheaters have their way, their hi-de-ho’s. You’re livin’ on your knees, forget the rule... oh,oh,oh,oh, idiots rule. . . . You know the man you hate, you look more like him every day...Hi-de- ho, two good shoes won’t save your soul, yeah...idiots rule"

Keep your powder dry

-Frank