All of this rhetoric over the tyranny of the
Affordable Care Act (ACA), and how it is going to take away our freedoms really
had me concerned. Now that the ACA has
survived the attempt by the Tea Partiers to get rid of it by repealing, defunding,
and delaying it has backfired, that may also have the effect of not getting rid
of all of the rest of the nasty regulations that keep us from really being
free. Woe is me!
With the federal Clean Water Act still in
place and pretty much working, I don’t have the freedom to drink water that has
little bits of stuff floating around in it.
I don’t have the freedom to drink water that might be tainted with
cholera. And just think, some of us won’t
have the freedom to have our water from the faucet catch on fire or watch our
rivers glow in the dark when they catch on fire.
And how terrifying has it been to breathe air
we can’t see after all of those regulations went into effect to control the
amount of pollution from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, automobiles and
other coal or oil fired engines? Not to
mention how our curiosity about how climate change will affect the planet over
the long-term. I really wanted to see
all of those hurricanes, tornados, excessive rainfall here in California that
causes our hills to turn to mud, and then the extended droughts here in the
west that cause even more extensive wild-fires than we have had. Boy, those people in Washington sure take the
fun out of life.
As for gambling, without food safety
regulations we could have had a good time gambling on whether the food we eat
had e-coli, salmonella or contaminants from herbicides all over it. Of course, if we didn’t want to gamble on
that we could buy locally produced food designated to be organic. Except without inspectors to make sure the
farms are organic, I guess we can still have the fun of gambling to see what
will happen to us.
When it comes time to take a vacation, we can
have all of the excitement of not knowing what the weather will be. Our weather reports come from a federal
agency, so imagine the fun of driving across Oklahoma and being caught in a
tornado. We may get to whirl around at a
couple a hundred miles an hour, and all for free. You have to pay to ride a roller coaster you
won’t know is safe because the inspectors are no longer on duty. A tornado would be so much better. And imagine the fun of being caught in a
hurricane if the vacation is near the gulf coast. Those surfs you see on TV look like they
would be terrific to surf, and why not?
No one is around to tell you whether the surf is safe or not. Nanny state all gone!
We could, I suppose, still gamble when we
decide to take a vacation. If we decide
to drive, we can be sure that our vehicle wasn’t inspected when it left the
plant, so we can play a game of whether the vehicle will last long enough to
get there. Or if we fly, we can gamble
on whether the plane was inspected before it was allowed to take off. Now that will be a hoot! We can grab the armrests with every little
bit of air turbulence before we find out if that is all it is, or whether the
plane is breaking up. And if it does break
up, no one will know why because the agency that determines what caused the air
accident is a federal agency. Without
all of those regulations we can go back to having no fear of flying.
Since there won’t be any gun control of any
kind, when there is a massive bombing, as at the Boston Marathon last year, we
won’t have to waste time trying to figure out “who done it”. Those incidents are investigated by federal
agencies. We can just shrug them off and
go about our business, having the freedom to wonder where it will happen
next.
Ah, freedom.
I can hardly wait until the next government shutdown, or debt
default. Maybe if the feds go for a
default and there is a total world-wide economic collapse all over the world, we
will be free of regulations, and then the corporations will be able to give us
all of the freedom we can handle.
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