As I was driving around Los Angeles yesterday, I noticed a storefront with a big Plus Sign + and the newly ubiquitous photo advertising the "medical" services.
This sighting put me in mind of the five small-ish intrusive things that have been thrust on individuals and are part of the creeping eradication of our basic liberties.
I believe in reasonable restrictions for the good of a society, so I wasn't particularly upset when cigarettes were banned in small closed in spaces, like airplanes. I wasn't even horribly upset when they were banned inside of a restaurant. But leave it to our keepers (nameless, faceless, all too frequently) to go that extra step--ban it everywhere, outside and, inside (there are those who would forbid you to smoke in your own apartment or house). And anything that even substitutes for a cigarette, like e-cigs, which emit only vapor are forbidden now, and includes e-cigs that have NO tobacco or nicotine, but simply look like cigarettes. Why? Because "we" the ever present "we" who always know better and can impress their will, fear that even the fakes will encourage smoking by the young. It doesn't stop them smoking of course. I see many a youngster taking drags on old fashioned cigarettes. I see many a cool cat tossing out his or her butt from a car. I recently purchased bubblegum cigarettes as kind of a joke. They look pretty real. I have thought about going into a restaurant and putting the "pack" on the table and waving one around. Guaranteed, I would not be permitted to have it. It isn't a cigarette. Isn't that free speech?
Meanwhile, smoking the weed is not only becoming permissible, but, we have the storefronts like the one I saw on virtually every block these days. And while supposedly one must prove that one needs it medically (and I am for a doctor prescribed use with the item provided by a regular pharmacy) the folks on the news crowding for their share are not I am guessing necessarily providing the documentation. Or, as we know, a lot of doctors will say something is medically necessary when it isn't. ("Hey, doc, could you write a note saying I'm laid up?" Never happens right?)
So now, if you go to a Hollywood Bowl to see someone as rad as Kristin Chenowith, somebody is there smoking a joint freely but you can't be seen with a fake cigarette of the traditional type. No one worries about my experience of second hand smoke here. Why? Because the society has accepted the idiocy that marijuana is "good" but the tobacco cigarette is "bad". In that advanced Brave New World, probably after (I hope) I'm dead, the movie "Now, Voyager" will have an approved edit. You know that scene where Bette Davis and Paul Henried are parting ways after a kind of forbidden romance, he puts two tobacco filled (and unfiltered omg!) cigarettes into his mouth and lights them and says, "Shall we have a cigarette on it?" and gives Bette one? That lovely romantic scene will now be Paul putting two joints into his mouth and he'll be dubbed saying, "Shall we have a toke on it?"
As Joan Rivers has many times said in her bits, "Don't get me started!" The world is going to hell on a hand basket, but here in California we are waging a major war--against plastic shopping bags. They are banned. Well, sort of. The tale is that the plastic bags were hurting the environment so they had to go in favor of these fabric like things or amalgam who knows what which you buy and forget to bring every time you go to a supermarket and have to buy more so that your car is a junk heap, or, for ten cents a piece you can buy a paper one. Oh, but wait a minute?! Didn't we get the plastic bags all those years ago because we were killing too many trees? I guess we have so many more trees now than we did then. But is deforestation no longer a problem. I thought it was.
The re-useable bags are wonderful, are they not? As long as you make sure that you separate the food stuffs to avoid contamination, and you don't want to put the Comet with the meat. And of course we will all wash our bags will we not? But wait a minute! I notice in Ralph's one of the largest grocery chains that you can still get a plastic bag. Oh, it is thicker than the old ones, and, of course, you have to pay that 10 cents for it. And who is benefiting? The stores charging the ten cents to those of us who always forget the ones that can be reused.
Shall we move on to the light bulb? I am a hoarder of the incandescent. Unless I die before I run out, I shall use no or very few of those twisty things that hurt the eyes, and if they break, require a hazmat team to clear the mercury. Now, they are covering the twisty things with what looks like the old incandescent. See it is just the same! "Buy me!" Oh, you'll have to because soon it will be illegal for stores to sell the incandescents. "What are you in for?" asks the guy in a cell in a local jail. "I sold black market incandescents", answers the newbie evildoer.
The red light camera, another brilliant move. First, we see that when someone comes up to one of those cameras, they either speed up or they slow down. Either way, they increase accidents. So a few have been removed from major intersections. And, guess what, we found out that a lot of those tickets, the money wasn't always going to the cities, but to some company--making a killing, if the lights didn't kill the drivers trying to figure out whether to speed up or slow up.
And now, we have a new species on the road to add to the traffic and danger, all in the name of ecology and community good feeling. The bicyclist. "Share the road." I have written about this inanity on these pages before. My sense of the foolishness of the idea of car and bicycle co-existing in Los Angeles or any major city in the United States (I saw how it goes in England, with a bus right on the tail of a bicyclist and tough if the bicyclist isn't moving fast enough!). Just the other day on Fountain Avenue, a crowded thoroughfare in West Hollywood, a guy with a backpack and ear buds was tooling happily along the road. None of us could pass him at the required three feet, well at any feet, and so the traffic was purely backed up until there was a space in the left lane and we could get out of the right lane. Our feel good politicians are setting drivers up for accidents, and not doing the bicyclists any good thereby.
These are the little totalitarian moments. And the big ones are already here or on their way. And who among us will stand up and say, "Stop the insanity!"
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