It wasn't until this weekend that I discovered that Mother's Day must be a big drinking weekend. Based on the police presence between my home and my Mom's home (about a 3 hour drive), it must rate up there with New Year's Eve, or July 4. It seemed like every mile or so we'd see another police car or state trooper either pulling someone over, or sitting there watching traffic.
When did we get here? This is not, believe it or not, a rant against speed limits. I understand better than many, if not most, how stupid people can be. If you didn't have speed limits, there absolutely would be some fool who decided he had to drive as fast as his car would take him to the other side of town through high traffic. I get that. I understand it.
However.
There is a difference between posting a speed limit and having enough enforcement to "keep people honest," and flooding a major Interstate with police on a weekend. That goes beyond "keeping them honest," all the way to "trying to catch them out," or "trying to increase revenue." There's something wrong with a society which limits mobility by overly strict, and overly aggressive enforcement of a rule which simply exists to keep people from being stupid. That's a society which has ceased to believe in "innocent until proven guilty," and moved to, "the innocent have nothing to hide." It's a society which believes that anyone taking their 5th Amendment right against self incrimination must have something to incriminate.
Ours is a society which is slowly losing it's liberty. We're allowing the State to interfere with our lives in ways it should not be able to. And, when pressed about why, we normally say something like, "Well, what are you going to do?" or "That's just the way it is." That is, down deep somewhere, we have had instilled in us the idea that There Are Rules. We don't even stop anymore to think if having a rule about something is justified, we just accept that There Are Rules. And the more we accept it, the more Rules will be placed upon us.
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