Back in the early 1970’s we watched the slow march toward soft tyranny get started with a bunch of good Samaritan-sounding people telling us they wanted to make the world safer with a “Buckle Up” campaign. It seemed innocent enough at the time. Who doesn’t want to save lives? Who thinks it’s a good idea to exit the car through the windshield? Who wants to end up the bloody corpse in a “Buckle Up” commercial? The American people were slowly convinced through graphic highway fatality commercials and ads put together by slick marketing people that wearing our seatbelts would save our lives. So laws were passed to make us do it in spite of having spent all that time and money to convince us. For those who missed the commercials, endless ads and needed to be prodded to get in line here they came with the sledge hammers to make sure we got it whether we wanted it or not.
And that was just the beginning.
At the time I grumbled that I should have the right to decide whether or not I wear a seatbelt, but I was a lone voice. No one listened and the laws were put in place.
I should have grumbled louder. I should have drawn the proverbial line in the sand. I should have fought for our lives. I should have made it into the freedom and liberty issue it is.
We all should have.
I have worn a seatbelt since they were available in cars. Back when I started driving there were bench seats across the front of the car or truck that would allow you to slide from one side of the car to the other in a sharp turn if you were not locked in. There’s nothing like trying to hold onto a steering wheel to stay in the driver’s seat while the car is sliding on a road – it’s not a position you want to find yourself in. Professional drivers wear seatbelts to stay in their seat and in control of their vehicles when they are in motion – that’s good enough for me. It’s just good common sense to wear a seatbelt – and it’s that common sense that all this over-nannification of society is taking out of us.
What was NOT good common sense was a law that forced us all to wear them.
The American people are big-hearted generous people who truly care, so it’s easy for us to be played by these charlatans who come with an agenda they want to shove down our throats. Those “feel good” laws were the beginning of a move away from freedom toward laws that now limit what we eat, where we smoke – if we can afford to smoke from all the taxes heaped on tobacco products – the cars we drive and a long list of regulations on our lives that are nothing less than oppressive and dictatorial. All of it was done from the same perspective of protecting lives, saving the planet, making sure we were safe, taking care of each other and being good citizens. In their push to make us better citizens they made us all into weaker citizens incapable of making decisions without direction from the government.
Slowly a tide of laws and supplemental taxes to control behaviors crept into our lives gradually boxing us in at every turn in our lives. Now there are numbers to call for the Green Police or the Doggie Poop Patrol. Really? What happened to the world? What happened to citizenship? What happened to responsibility? What happened to people who believed we should stand on our own two feet and we should not have a lawyer on speed dial?
We are still here. Yes, there is a very vocal minority that loves to scream they are offended at the drop of a hat and try to force more regulations down our throats. The pushback has begun. The drive to retake our country is underway. It can be mischaracterized by the media all they want, old warhorses can be trotted out to give bad advice until they turn blue in the face, the people have learned and see the light at the end of the tunnel.
America deserves better.
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