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I drove my gas-guzzling, 11-miles-to-the-gallon F-150 truck to Seattle on Friday, like my work товарищи and I do every Friday. The commute down was like any other morning, but the return trip was about as much fun as Fiberglas insulation in your underwear. Rush hour traffic on I-5 North was heavy or stop-and-go for the first two and a half hours of our soul-crushing trek back home. It was 7:30pm by the time we inched our way through Everett and Marysville, a 35-mile trip that usually takes 60 to 75 minutes.
Shortly after Marysville, the speed picked up and we were soon hurling towards Mount Vernon at seventy five miles per hour. As we entered the Skagit Valley, a state patrol car had a driver pulled over on the side of the highway, so everyone slowed their roll. Just as I passed the patrol car, he pulled onto the highway, and immediately hit his lights again, directly behind me. Goddammit, what the fuck was I doing? I was in the center lane, doing 65 mph in a 70 zone, and I wasn’t following too close. Shit! I made my way to the side of the highway and reached into my glove compartment for proof of insurance and registration. As Officer Barney made it to my window, the first words out of his mouth were, “Why aren’t you wearing your seat belt?”
Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me? Thinking quickly, I told Mr. Fife that we just spent more than 2 hours in stop and go traffic, and I removed it because it’s uncomfortable. Hey, half of what I said was true! The trooper took my papers, including my recently-acquired 2008 sticker for the license plate. He actually applied the tab to the rear plate for me before calling into KGB headquarters to verify my state-issued credentials. Barney was only gone five minutes before he darkened my window again, handing me registration, drivers license, and a green citation for $112. Simply excellent!
Sweet merciful gods of traffic am I ever thankful that our government is patrolling our highways and byways, hunting out and fining the drivers who aren’t wearing their seat belts. Drivers who eat meals, fuck with their TomToms or stereos, talk on their cell phones, or even text message their friends have absolutely no affect on accident statistics. Nope. Not like us insensitive cock heads who don’t wear our seat belts. It’s the selfish motherfuckers like me, that choose not to wear a seat belt that need to be dealt with. We’re a scourge! We’re killing everyone in our path and we must be stopped before we… ride without a belt again!
How fucking retarded are we?
Don’t get me wrong. I do not dispute the facts that wearing your seat belt increases the likelihood of surviving an accident. I’ve read the numbers that say more than 11,000 lives are saved each year simply because victims were wearing their seat belts. And I believe that children should be forced to wear seat belts, because they don’t know any better. But should our government be passing laws that mandate we must wear seat belts? Undeniably, drivers and their passengers who wear seat belts are less likely to die in the event of an accident. Our government sees that as reason enough for mandatory seat belt laws, since saving lives is what seems to butter their balloon knot. However, eating healthy and abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes, for example, are also excellent ways to extend your life cycle… save lives. Why hasn’t our government made healthy eating mandatory? Last time I checked, McDonald's and Hostess are raking in billions, and the bar scene in every American town is thriving. No mandatory laws about not drinking or smoking, are there? As long as you’re 18 years old or older, you can smoke all the cigarettes you want, and drive at the same time. Just make sure you’re wearing your magical life-saving seat belt.
What’s more surprising is not wearing your seat belt is a primary infraction. That means a police officer can pull you off the highway and fine you for exercising your personal freedom of choice. If you’re doing nothing more than driving your vehicle without the use of a restraining device, you will be cited and forced to pay a fine. It sounds about as stupid as ticketing someone who’s wearing orange on Saint Patrick's Day. This is a kick to the twig and berries when you consider major distractions, such as talking or texting on a cell phone, eating a double cheeseburger, and shaving are still 100% legal (for the time being).
Oh sure, our Orwellian State has passed bills that were signed into law that makes texting and talking without a hands-free device a secondary offense. However, they don’t go into effect until January 1, 2008 (texting) and July 1, 2008 (no hands-free). A secondary offense means that you can’t be pulled over for simply being distracted while talking on the phone. Oh no, you have to actually break some other law before you can busted. I guess you have to kill a motherfucker with your car before you will be fined… all because you just had to read that last “Paris Hilton Jail Diary” text message from Fox News. Brilliant! I get pulled over and fined $112 for driving without my seat belt even though I was driving safely, under the posted speed limit, with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. Meanwhile, the dickheads driving up my ass or the Asians unable to maintain a constant speed in the left-hand lane, are bouncing from rumble strip to Botts' dots while talking on their phone. They’re free to go on their happy fucking way without so much as a second glance. God bless our Stalinist utopia!
You might try to argue that our government frequently infringes on our personal freedoms and liberties, and that we don’t consider these infringements unjust. For example, we restrict a driver’s right to drive as fast as they want. Why? Because driving like A.J. Foyt tweakin’ on meth will might injure other drivers on the road. This law is morally okay since the law protects others’ right to live. Traffic laws are written to keep order and make the roads as safe as possible for everyone who uses them. However, seat belt usage only affects the seat belt wearer. If you choose to wear a seat belt, then you believe it increases your own safety… which affects no one but you. If I choose not to wear a seat belt, then I believe the seat belt is a pain in my ass… and I’m not affecting anyone but myself.
I’ve seen reasoning for mandatory seat belt laws based on the drivers who don’t wear seat belts cost our government money. Their thinking is that if I severely injured in an accident because I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, that I might require long-term hospital care or become permanently disabled and be stuck on state-funded disability. Wouldn’t that happen if I was injured in an accident while wearing my seat belt? If Hurricane Katrina taught us anything, it’s that the American people truly believe our government should be caring and providing for its citizens as if they are her children. Some people in the Gulf region, New Orleans particularly, felt the government should have stopped Katrina from making landfall… or at the very least, bought them a new Gucci bag and a plasma TV for their new government-built home. When did the country grow titties? I don’t recall the Constitution or the Bill of Rights saying anything about the government caring for your ass. This is America, goddammit! We’re not your fucking mommy!
As an American adult, we have freedoms and liberties that are granted by the Declaration of Independence. In Thomas Jefferson‘s on words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That’s an awesome sentence! We have the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Who the fuck said Big Brother can tell me what to wear? What’s next? Is the man going to tell me I can’t eat trans fat and legislate laws that outlaw unsaturated fats? Helmet laws for pedestrians? Feeding tube laws for the Terry Schiavos on the world? Maybe knee and elbow pad laws for White House interns? It’s a very slippery slope when lawmakers write laws to protect us from ourselves.
Did our government become a socialist state when I wasn’t looking? Did I miss an announcement that said our government will provide for us and take care of us? If we’re not careful, we’ll cross over into totalitarianism… then we may as well line a bird cage with the charter documents that our forefathers wrote and so many people died protecting. Just imagine the state-operated television commercials: “For the good of the Proletariat:
- All male citizens must wear a clean oxford dress shirt, black slacks, a black wool tie, and black wingtips.
- Women will remain at home, cook food, keep house, raise children, and only speak when spoken to.
- Couples of opposite sex must copulate in late summer for a spring birth.
- Couples will raise three offspring total.
- Any more than one female offspring conceived will be euthanized.
- The color of your domicile shall be olive drab or battleship gray.
- All citizens will take their government-supplied vitamin-enriched dietary supplement.
- Drivers of the roadways must wear their seat belts.
- Failure to comply will result in смерть.”
I’m not being funny. We’re not too far from this kind of thinking here in the United States, and it all starts with seat belts, trans fat, and the PATRIOT Act.
I’m sure there’s one or two people (all of you?) reading this thinking I’ve finally gone off the deep end. I promise you I haven’t. Some will disagree because they feel seat belts and safety are good things. While it’s hard to argue the fact, it still boils down to their personal viewpoint. They are morally and constitutionally entitled to their viewpoint, but they should not force their personal viewpoint on others. Just think about the ridiculousness of the seat belt law. Our government, in its infinite wisdom, believes we’re intelligent enough to navigate a deadly mass of steel and plastic (weighing several thousand pounds or tons) down the road reaching speeds anywhere from 25 to 70+ miles per hour, sometimes in complete darkness. But somehow, this trust eludes our lawmakers when it comes to seat belts, because suddenly we’re not smart enough to perform this simple task without wearing a seat belt. Seriously! If our government thinks I’m too fucking dumb to wear my seat belt and must pass a law to force it upon me, then why am I permitted to obtain a drivers license? It’s all about the Benjamins, baby… with a Hamilton and two Washingtons!
I personally feel mandatory seat belt laws are a way for our government to raise revenue with far less effort, to the tune of $112 per person (soon to be $124 in July 2007). The cops just sit in their patrol cars and harass otherwise honest citizens going about their lawful business, whose only “wrong doing” is not wearing a seat belt. In 2004, Washington State Troopers wrote 95,334 tickets for seat belt violations. They wrote 82,128 seat belt tickets in 2005. Using the old $101 fine, Washington collected $17,923,662 in two years from one morally incorrect law. Amazing!
Fuck, to be honest, I don’t know why I’m bitching. I live in a society that needs to put warning labels on hair dryers because some mentally challenged fucktards haven’t figured out that water and electricity don’t mix. There are warnings on crazy things like coffee cups because some litigious dumbasses forgot that coffee is HOT! One that always bugged me is the warning on small packets of silica gel; “Do not eat.” How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that Nikon packed a handy snack in the box your new digital camera came in? Let’s drop the warning labels and mandatory safety laws so we can thin the herd a bit, with a little help from natural selection.
In the end, I’ll grumble under my breath as I write a check and pay my $112 fine. I sure hope the post office has warnings on self-stick stamps. I’d hate to lick a self-adhesive stamp and have it get stuck to my tongue. Shouldn’t the government save me from choking to death on a 41¢ square piece of paper that might lodge itself in my pharynx?
