INJUSTICE/UNREST
THE LETTER OF THE LAW

By: Al Cronkrite

With laws spewing forth from 435 congressmen and a hundred senators in Washington, 40 state senators in Tallahassee, and a cadre of local legislators, Florida is being inundated with laws. It is hard to exit our houses without breaking a law.  We are suffering from stage-four legal carcinoma.  With volumes of law already on the books and new ones being added daily obedience is impossible.

For the little yellow light before the school grounds we quickly slow from forty miles per hour to twenty miles per hour.  It blinks for a period of half hour or more twice every school day and since it is electrically controlled sometimes when there is no school.  Almost no one walks to school anymore and there is seldom, if ever, a student visible anywhere on the sidewalk or roadway outside the fence that surrounds the school.  The slow-down is to protect students but there are no students to protect.

Early on Sunday morning on a six lane highway the only visible vehicle stops at a left turn signal and being completely alone on the highway turns left against the signal.  A policeman parked off the highway in a gas station across the street stops the vehicle and the driver pays a $300 dollar fine.

A twinge of foolishness passes over a driver stopped at a sign when there is not another vehicle in sight.

Granted, it is difficult to control traffic.  But traffic laws are boondoggles that have deteriorated into a contest between police and citizens and are often used by local governments to enhance revenue.  Cameras that record the license numbers of cars that violate traffic signals are the latest pocket picking device.  Issuing expensive tickets for actions that are safe and logical casts a pall on the law and adds to the disdain that plagues police officers.

For most Americans their only experience with law enforcement is a confrontation with a traffic cop.   Being forced to stop the car, ordered to produce identification, and queried as if suspected of a crime by a policeman who is heavily armed and threatening, and who demands compliance when thousands of other drivers are committing the same offense with impunity rubs many victims the wrong way.  The demand for acquiescence sometimes produces a belligerence that results in innocent but stubborn citizens being dragged from their vehicles, thrown to the pavement, handcuffed and transported to a local jail.  Judges support belligerent cops.

The incremental deterioration of the policies of our police forces has resulted in a self-protective, self indulgent attitude in organizations that used to serve the public but now have often become an enemy to those they are supposed to serve.  It is illegal for a citizen to lie to a policeman but legal for a policeman to lie to a citizen.  It is legal for policemen to beat up a suspect but illegal for the suspect to resist.  Without seeing a weapon, solely on suspicion of lethal resistance policemen can murder an innocent suspect with impunity.  The innocent murdered suspect is quickly forgotten but when a policeman is murdered the grieving process is grandiose.

Over forty years ago President Nixon proclaimed drugs “enemy number one” and began the disastrous War on Drugs.  Like the War on Terror it is perennial, like the experience with Prohibition it is futile, and like the misuse of traffic laws it has become a source of illegitimate revenue.  Millions of dollars have been confiscated and used to enrich local police departments.  In some states a few ounces of marijuana found by a sniffing dog can result in the loss of one’s car, one’s cash, and one’s freedom.  The arbitrary appropriation of large amounts of cash and property receives little publicity but policemen strive to find these marks sometimes using instructions that are readily available on the internet. Read about this travesty here and here

Murder, burglary, and robbery used to be the three major crimes.  Today, selectively determined “sexual offenses” are the most feared and most punished.  Murderers no longer receive the headline coverage awarded to child molesters.  Murder is routine while child molestation is sensational.  Sex offenders are branded with a symbolic S.O. that like Hester’s Scarlet Letter identifies their existence.  However, unlike Hawthorn’s Hester who gained acceptance, their sentence involves a lifetime of being feared, shunned, and persecuted often for political advantage.

We have created an artificial set of laws that apply to children but the definition of children has become as blurred as the definition of a baby.  Eighteen is broadly accepted as the age of adulthood but being chronologically adult bears no relationship to personal maturity; some individuals are mature at thirteen and others are immature a thirty.  Humanist abortion advocates claim that “fetuses” are not human beings.  This definition becomes seriously questionable at the time of birth when a full orbed baby is sometimes mutilated to obtain stem cells that were touted as potential cures for human diseases but are also being used for commercial purposes such as food flavoring.