Like sheep, we only bleat
So a truck on Interstate 95 is sighted carrying a leaky 55-gal barrel. Maybe it’s leaking an acid. STOP THE PRESSES—and all the southbound traffic for over three hours the other day at mile 140.
Blame the lawyers. Otherwise the intelligent thing to have done was to disperse the liquid with a blast of tap water, just like when you wash the family car. If that had actually been done, drivers would have gone merrily on their momentarily disrupted way.
In your dreams. In no time flat, greedy lawyers would have rounded up “injured” citizens nearby to sue the pants off Stafford’s fire and rescue folks who responded. They had to perform the prescribed and oh-so-delicate “Hazmat” measures on the spilled puddles by the book, or else. For over three hours.
Then too, tub thumpers for Save Chesapeake Bay would have been right behind the lawyers, hollering for penalties against the state for allowing pollution near a precious watershed, or somesuch.
Perhaps I exaggerate? You judge. To me, it’s just one more example of how soft and impractical a society we have become.
And illogical. We pay exhorbitant prices for bottled water while complaining about the high price of gasoline, which is way cheaper. We blame oil companies while preventing them from exploring for oil or building more refineries. Our energy prices rise while we eschew cheap coal and prevent more nuclear power plants. We complain about illegal immigrants but spend more to fight global “warming” than to control our borders.
"Listening to the recent debates among the candidates.. one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations…The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change." --pundit Michael Barone
Back to our borders for a moment, please: I laud the efforts to make us secure, but I must admit I don’t know why we’re so vehement about fencing off Mexicans and at the same time sympathetic over Cubans trying to land in Florida. Aren’t they every bit as illegal?
Still on the subject of illogical stuff making softies of us all, what can be crazier than class-action lawsuits? They hike our medical bills, but mostly enrich lawyers. Here I must confess to having benefited (by $400) from a class-action settlement of a suit against Dominion Power a few years ago. My backyard has an easement allowing the electric company to string power lines overhead, which it did long before I moved here. Later it also strung some fiber optic cables. So, for its neglect in getting my permission to do so, I suffered greatly. Baloney. I did cash the check, though. Soft? You said it.
We see someone smoking and have a fit. But actually there are many more smokers among us than there are any ethnic groups. You know, the ones we bend over backwards not to offend? In doing so, let’s at least acknowledge that smoking isn’t—yet—against the law. But just wait.
As iconoclast John Stossel quips, “In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.”
By the way, no sooner had I heard the news of our I-95 traffic fiasco than here came a new announcement from the White House: We must not mistreat war prisoners so beastly. That includes deriding their religion, which apparently okays suicide bombing and chopping off opponents’ heads. Never mind that they also regularly preach that Jews are monkeys and so forth. We’re ever so much more delicate nowadays. To what purpose? Beats me.
Then there’s General Peter Pace. He’s history. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was interviewed a few months ago by the Chicago Tribune: “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” he said. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”
That did it.
How sensitive we’ve become. Or just scared? Here’s Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “[W]hy is it that so many of us who know better about so much that we see around us cower and speak in hushed, mousy voices?"
Columnist Thomas Sowell, in a similar vein: “Whenever I hear terrorists referred to in the media as ‘militants,’ it is a painful reminder that we have degenerated to the point where we no longer even have the courage to talk straight.”
Well, those are my two cents for this week. If I offended anyone, tough toenails.
Blame the lawyers. Otherwise the intelligent thing to have done was to disperse the liquid with a blast of tap water, just like when you wash the family car. If that had actually been done, drivers would have gone merrily on their momentarily disrupted way.
In your dreams. In no time flat, greedy lawyers would have rounded up “injured” citizens nearby to sue the pants off Stafford’s fire and rescue folks who responded. They had to perform the prescribed and oh-so-delicate “Hazmat” measures on the spilled puddles by the book, or else. For over three hours.
Then too, tub thumpers for Save Chesapeake Bay would have been right behind the lawyers, hollering for penalties against the state for allowing pollution near a precious watershed, or somesuch.
Perhaps I exaggerate? You judge. To me, it’s just one more example of how soft and impractical a society we have become.
And illogical. We pay exhorbitant prices for bottled water while complaining about the high price of gasoline, which is way cheaper. We blame oil companies while preventing them from exploring for oil or building more refineries. Our energy prices rise while we eschew cheap coal and prevent more nuclear power plants. We complain about illegal immigrants but spend more to fight global “warming” than to control our borders.
"Listening to the recent debates among the candidates.. one gets the impression that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations…The Republicans want to protect us against Islamist terrorists. The Democrats want to protect us against climate change." --pundit Michael Barone
Back to our borders for a moment, please: I laud the efforts to make us secure, but I must admit I don’t know why we’re so vehement about fencing off Mexicans and at the same time sympathetic over Cubans trying to land in Florida. Aren’t they every bit as illegal?
Still on the subject of illogical stuff making softies of us all, what can be crazier than class-action lawsuits? They hike our medical bills, but mostly enrich lawyers. Here I must confess to having benefited (by $400) from a class-action settlement of a suit against Dominion Power a few years ago. My backyard has an easement allowing the electric company to string power lines overhead, which it did long before I moved here. Later it also strung some fiber optic cables. So, for its neglect in getting my permission to do so, I suffered greatly. Baloney. I did cash the check, though. Soft? You said it.
We see someone smoking and have a fit. But actually there are many more smokers among us than there are any ethnic groups. You know, the ones we bend over backwards not to offend? In doing so, let’s at least acknowledge that smoking isn’t—yet—against the law. But just wait.
As iconoclast John Stossel quips, “In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.”
By the way, no sooner had I heard the news of our I-95 traffic fiasco than here came a new announcement from the White House: We must not mistreat war prisoners so beastly. That includes deriding their religion, which apparently okays suicide bombing and chopping off opponents’ heads. Never mind that they also regularly preach that Jews are monkeys and so forth. We’re ever so much more delicate nowadays. To what purpose? Beats me.
Then there’s General Peter Pace. He’s history. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was interviewed a few months ago by the Chicago Tribune: “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” he said. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”
That did it.
How sensitive we’ve become. Or just scared? Here’s Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “[W]hy is it that so many of us who know better about so much that we see around us cower and speak in hushed, mousy voices?"
Columnist Thomas Sowell, in a similar vein: “Whenever I hear terrorists referred to in the media as ‘militants,’ it is a painful reminder that we have degenerated to the point where we no longer even have the courage to talk straight.”
Well, those are my two cents for this week. If I offended anyone, tough toenails.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
7:23 PM
