Just How Free a People do we Want to Be?

This is what the lady had to say:

You have obviously never had a loved one become addicted to drugs otherwise you would never want drugs to be legal.

This was my response:

I'm sorry someone you love became addicted to drugs. However, it doesn't give you, or anyone else, the right to deny me the freedom to choose or not to choose to take drugs. Whatever happened to the land of liberty?

I knew fellows who died in Vietnam, yet they never passed legislation prohibiting war. Likewise the thousands of people who lose loved ones to automobile accidents every year never see driving banned. Alcoholism is a brutal disease, yet even after we banned alcohol, we unbanned it!

What freedom do we have if we cannot choose of our own volition to eschew drugs? And by making drugs illegal, we've enhanced their cachet for countless people and declared war on many Americans. You know, "forbidden fruit." If our ancestors defied the good Lord Himself on that, why do you think that anyone should obey a government of men on it?

By all means share your story so others can learn, but don't expect people to behave as you want them to, and don't think you have a right to expect the government to legislate such behavior.

The question is, how far does a free society go in proscribing certain behavior?

When European settlers first arrived in the New World, seeking, we're told, religious tolerance, tolerance was the furthest thing from their minds – they wanted to be free to practice their religion without interference from the state. They were as intolerant of difference as the authorities they fled, and they used the coercive power of government to enforce their morals.

Some time later, after proclaiming that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, those settlers' descendents fought a bloody war for the right to govern themselves, rather than bow to a distant King. Yet in forming their government after winning that war, they managed to craft a government that officially recognized the right of some people to own other people. It took another war to end the practice of slavery in the USA.

The issues generating controversy today – drug use, sexual activities, and marriage, to name some of the most visible – don't approach slavery in terms of the extent to which one group of humans abuses the rights of another group. Nevertheless, in our own nation's evolution, the fact that a majority of our citizens (and not the same majority in all cases) is willing to use the power of the government to impose its will on the minority is troubling, especially when one considers that most of those majorities are self-described conservatives – that is, people who believe in a small government that doesn't involve itself in the private affairs of the governed.

Happy Fathers' Day!

It was a little surprising listening to Mr. Boortz on Friday (June 18). I'm not talking about his seemingly endless rants about President Obama, his virulent opposition to labor unions or his crusade against what he calls “government schools.” What surprised me was his reckless misuse and abuse of statistics.

Now, understand that of all the right-wing talk radio hosts, I admire and respect Neal Boortz the most. (How could anyone not like someone whose own web page characterizes him as the “America's most under-rated and overpaid talk show host?”) He doesn't take himself too seriously, and frequently advises listeners not to believe anything he says unless they personally know it to be true, or confirm it from an independent source. He's got no problem laughing at himself, and I've heard him take issue with right-wing callers who go out of bounds. For example, I've heard him on multiple occasions berate callers who've claimed that the President hates America, and yesterday he berated a caller who suggested that the President's involvement in establishing the BP fund of $20 billion was motivated by a desire to line his own pockets with some of the money.

And on the occasions he manages to talk about something other than politics, I find myself agreeing with him more often than not. He's definitely an excellent companion for morning driving.

Anyway, the Friday before Fathers' Day, Mr. Boortz was discussing the importance of fathers in a child's life. First, let me point out that I generally agree with all he had to say; what disappointed me was this very intelligent man so egregiously abusing statistics.

Now, I don't remember the exact figures, so don't hold me to them – you'll get the idea.

Boortz started out by saying that of all prisoners in the US, some large percentage of them – let's say 80% - grew up in households without a father. He then said something along the lines of “that's proof enough of the importance of a father in a child's upbringing,” as if the existence of the stat proved some sort of causative relationship.

Now, if he'd had a stat that showed that a greater percentage of those from fatherless homes wind up in prison than those from two-parent homes, then there's stronger proof of cause.

See, if there were no fatherless households at all – if our world was ideal in that respect – there'd still be people in prison, and 100% of them would be from households with fathers, and what would that prove? Or let's say that only a dozen households in the US were fatherless, and all of the children from those households were in prison – then the stat being through out would be that out of the over 2 million prisoners in the US, less than 50 came from fatherless households – leading to the inevitable conclusion that if you want your kid to stay out of prison, throw his father out of the house!

Of course, that's not the fact – the important statistic isn't the percentage of the prison population that's fatherless, it's the percentage of fatherless people who are in prison.

Who knows? Perhaps he was just cutting corners and using that particular statistic to emphasize something I think most of us take as fact – kids need both parents in the home if they're going to have the best chance at a successful life. Take either parent out of the household and you present the kids involved with an enormous stumbling block which many can't overcome.

It being Father's Day today, it's appropriate to give a few moments thought to this idea. I think too many people of parenting age are enthralled by the idea of enjoying all the privileges of adulthood without concomitantly accepting the responsibilities – that is, not being willing to face up to the consequences of their actions. Birth control is the responsibility of both adults having sex, and abortion is a terrible form of birth control. And if you're adult enough to make a baby, you ought to be adult enough to stick around for the next couple of decades and help that baby become an adult!

So Happy Fathers' Day to all the dads out there, but I'm here to tell you that it's at best bittersweet if you can't share the day with your kids.

Is it Really all that Tough to Spell Correctly?

I went to play tennis with my gorgeous wife this morning. The idea was hers; on Saturday morning, my first impulse is to stay in bed; upon getting up, my first impulse is to return to bed.

We're northwest of Atlanta, and we're experiencing a heat wave this week. Thus, we decided that if we're going to do something like play tennis, we should do so before it got too hot. Joan's idea was to get up early and be on the court by nine.

We play at public courts in Cherokee County because the subdivision we live in was built before they invented tennis. When we got to the courts, I was surprised to see that all four courts were empty, despite it being 10:00 or so.

After playing for a while, I took a break to use the restroom, a little shed about ten yards from the courts, an ideal location. Both the men's and ladies' rooms had nice, freshly-printed signs on them. Both, alas, were locked. I wondered about that as I wandered off to use the restrooms by the baseball fields. After going to all that trouble to print the signs to identify the two restrooms properly, why had they been locked? Was someone concerned that they'd be misread?

It's a nice sports complex at Hobgood Park, by the way, and the park gets a good amount of use, especially on weekends. If you like to watch or play tennis, soccer or basebalol, or just enjoy hanging out in a place where lots of people are doing just that, I highly recommend it! Today, all the baseball fields were in use by the various little league teams, and the walkways were filled with kids and their parents. A nice scene.

Then I saw it. On one of the gates to the complex, designed to be seen easily from the parking lot when the gates are licked, a painted metal sign: “Field's Closed” It would have been okay if there'd been only one field, but there are three of four field's – ahem, fields – protected by that gate. I looked around and saw a couple of other examples of misused apostrophes used in plural words.

Now, I know that many people are rolling their eyes. What's the big deal? I'll tell you the big deal – these are kids, children. They're in school. They're being brought up like good Americans, to have respect for authority. They see the signs placed around the park, and they assume they're properly spelled and punctuated. And so they pick up a bad habit and perpetuate it.

My real question is this – why are these things allowed to happen? Don't the people in charge of signage in our public places know how to spell? How long would a misspelled word last on a sign erected by the public library?

For years, every time I got a communication from my daughter's school, I'd read it carefully. When we lived in New Jersey, I'd say that about half of them contained some sort of spelling or punctuation error, or worse. Here in Georgia, that percentage declined significantly, but every now and then there'd be something from the school that was, well, challenged.

Perhaps I should have contacted the schools about this, but I didn't want my daughter to get stigmatized for having a picky dad. I know that my estimation of their capabilities was affected by my realization that they cared so little for parents' sensibilities that they would send out communications that contained errors of the sort they claimed to be teaching our children to avoid.

The same thing happens in everyday life. I'd never walk into a restaurant with a misspelled sign in the window, and I've gotten up and walked out of restaurants with misspelled menu items (“bacon and egg's”). If you have so little respect for your customers that you can't be bothered to spell menu items correctly, in what other ways will that lack of respect manifest itself?

So that's today's rant – if you're going to go to the trouble of making a sign or printing a menu or sending a letter home to your students' parents, take the time to express yourself clearly and make sure you spell and punctuate your words correctly. It's one of those things that few people will notice when you do it right, but many will notice when you do it wrong.