You'll Put Your Eye Out!

"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool...but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog" --G.K. Chesterton


I never thought I would say this in a million years.  But, last week, the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, actually did something reasonable, sensible, and intelligent.  Of course, a week later he was undone by his own city council, but at least we can give him points for trying.  I may actually lay a golden egg for writing this, but….wait for it…there are actually people in this world more liberal than the Mayor of San Francisco!  Yeah.  I think I just divided by zero.

During the November elections, San Francisco law makers approved a city ordinance that would ban fast food restaurants from including toys in kid’s meals unless those meals met a certain standard for healthiness.  I would put the figures for actual healthiness here but I don’t want to and because your Google works just as well as mine.  Anyway, the week after the elections, Mayor Newsom, defying the laws of man and god, vetoed the measure saying, “That law is totally gay.”  (He didn’t say that, but that would have been really funny if he had.)  Not to be outdone, the city counsel promptly brushed other, less important city business to the side in order to rally in support of the measure.  Because, honestly, if one more week went by it could be your child killed by a Happy Meal.  The counsel voted to overturn Boromir and allow Frodo and Sam to take the ring to…wait…what just happened.

So let it be written, so let it be done!  The good city of San Fran has saved your children from salt and fat and badness of all types by keeping your child from being tempted by the $.04 treasures that accompany the junk food we’ve enjoyed by choice for over a thousand years. (That’s an estimate)  That’s one way of looking at it, here’s another:  The city of San Fransicko has decided that you are not responsible enough to raise your own children in the manner you see fit.  You are not smart enough to decide how often your kid should be allowed to eat this or that.  You are stupid and the city must step in and do your thinking and your choice-making for you--you poor miserable uneducated stupid citizen. And sadly, there is a lot of this country that doesn’t see a problem with this.

Have we really ascended to such an advanced stage of progressive enlightenment as to be willing to abdicate our personal liberties and responsibilities to a higher “thinking body” just to satiate our laziness?  Month after month we hand over more and more of our right to choose so that the government, be it local or federal, can make those choices for us.  Several years ago people thought it was pure insanity when New York City first banned smoking inside places of business.  Now it’s everywhere.  We have laws telling us what we can eat and drink, and what restaurants can put in your food.  Our noble fathers keep us safe with helmet laws, seat belt laws, bicycle laws, and yes…roller skating laws.

There is a proposed law in Missouri to force liquor stores to only sell beer over 60°F (not the outside temperature, I’m talking about the temp of the beer itself).  Some brain trust thinks this will curb drunk driving.   There are taxes on unhealthy ingredients in food.  Laws stipulating the portion sizes restaurants can serve.  Have you heard of ‘Keg Tracking”?  Your beer keg has a GPS device to track  your movements.  Someone thinks this will stem underage drinking.   Playgrounds have “No Running” signs.  Normal childhood games, like Tag and Redrover, have been banned because there is the potential that your precious little snowflake might not return home from school in the package-perfect, unopened collector’s condition in which you sent him.  At what point is the general proletariat going to accept compulsory bubble-wrap before we are allowed to venture outside of our choice-proofed safety dwellings (government approved) to ride the seatbelt-secured walking-speed personal conveyance system (government supplied) to get to the grocery store where you can purchase four different flavors of ‘Food’.

The entire country is going to look like it was gobbled up by Fisher Price and we’re going to be eating USDA Choice Soilent Green!  DAMN IT!!!!

People need to be free to live their lives.  They need to be able to make their choices and live and learn from the consequences of those choices.  If you want to be a paragon of health, have fun.  If you want to be a fat lazy bastard with Cheetos hiding under your man-boobs--go nuts.  The best part of life is living it, enjoying it, taking the risks you want and not taking the ones you don’t.  If you want to smoke…smoke.  You know the risks,  but you’re a grown ass man so do what you want.  You want to really live on the edge and drive to the mail box without wearing your seat belt…be extreme my friend! Get down with your bad self and put a little ketchup on that corndog so that it can reach its full goodness potential.

I’m not a fan of Woody Allen’s movies, or his glasses, or his voice, or well, mostly Woody Allen, but I do like this quote from him, “I could live to be a hundred, but I’d have to give up everything that would make me want to.”

So stop letting your lawmakers stop your fun!  And for those of you worried about the consequences of other people doing stupid shit that can hurt them: Dr. Darwin is always there waiting to take care of them in his own, special way.  That, and there’s Youtube.