The one thing governments do excessively well is legislate, and most of that is directed at solving a particular problem in a dramatic and supposedly final way.
It’s kind of like your dad losing his mind in the front seat of the car when the kids are acting up. He’ll finally snap and threaten everyone with a whupping unless the bickering stops.
Dads eventually grow past that phase and mellow a bit. Not so much with the government.
Take flying, for instance. After 9-11, and the advent of the execrable Patriot Act, anyone wanting to board a flight, regardless of whether it’s in a puddle jumper within a state or international, passengers must arrive at the airport roughly two hours early to navigate the relentless rigamarole that the TSA says is required.
Because of school shootings, which are heinous indeed, all school campuses look like prisons, with gates and fences and warning signs. I recently took a trip to the town where I went to high school, only to find I couldn’t even see the school because of the cinder-block fence. It wasn’t the only school like that.
I attended a rock concert on Friday (Styx, Kevin Cronin, Don Felder) at the Cynthia Woods Pavilion in The Woodlands, but you would have thought I was boarding a plane at GWB in Houston; there is a clear bag policy in place, and hosts of rules to follow, and all this after you pay to get into the area. You also have to go through metal detectors and have the contents of your pockets examined.
With the exception of the smaller counties, most courthouses require the same type of security, what with detectors and scanners (Heaven forbid you forget your nail clippers attached to your keyring).
Even on an individual level, there are more and more gated communities, Ring cameras, dashboard cameras (both front- and rear-facing), and even more technological doodads “designed for your protection. Your safety is our concern.”
The world is not a safe place, I think we all can agree; however, while the bad guys are still being bad guys, and bad things keep happening, why haven’t the safety measures put in place shown any effectiveness?
Or, more importantly, why haven’t our fearless leaders realized that punishing the entirety of the country only deters good people from taking advantage of opportunities for travel and entertainment? It’s almost like that’s the point — keeping the population in check, since everyone is staying locked up at home. But even that wasn’t effective, as the idiocy surround mask mandates showed.
In all of the measures taken for safety and security purposes, the one thing that remains missing is dealing with the root causes of the problem at hand. Therein lies the largest problem of all; the muddled groupthink of liberalism and its need to coddle.
For instance, in Trump’s first term when COVID broke out, he proposed pausing travel and immigration from certain countries, such as China, where the virus actually came from. He also put a hold on immigration from certain countries in the Middle East to combat terrorism. In each case, and many more like it, he was labeled a racist.
There are many more examples to illustrate that particular point, but the bottom line is that stopping the bad guys is a problem. Because of that, the liberal “dads” in the front seat of the U.S. station wagon are punishing everyone, and us “kids” are getting more and more frustrated because the bad apples don’t care.
The only solution to these and many more problems lies in the root causes, and that will require a government willing to represent its people correctly.
Or, in the words of the great Ronald Reagan, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
