Is there anybody here who doesn't speed? Seriously, do you always stay at exactly 65 miles an hour on the freeway, or are you like everybody else, driving around 71 miles an hour? Or even faster, if you don't mind standing out?
People say “no more than 15 mph over the speed limit”, and “stay out of the fast lane and don't attract attention”, but you know it's just a game of roulette. You never know when you'll run into a policeman who has to fill his quota…
Follow me below the squiggle, because I have more questions I'd like to ask you.
What about alcohol? Do you always make sure you're under the blood-alcohol limit when you drive?
What about marijuana? Do you like to smoke grass? (I know I'm dating myself by calling it grass, instead of the current slang) You DO realize that it's against the law unless you have a legal prescription, don't you?
Ever fudged on your taxes? Maybe underreported a little something?
What I'm trying to point out is that breaking the law is against the law. I know; it's an oxymoron, and yet so many of my fellow citizens break the law intentionally every day, sometimes in several ways. And that makes almost all of us lawbreakers.
This means that we actually cultivate an outlaw mentality; we think it's “cool” to get away with certain things, and our system of laws actually encourages this. We look for the loophole; and as a consequence, we're always looking over our shoulder. “Did that cop see me? Was I little too blatant in not coming to a full stop at that stop sign? Is he going to smell the smoke in my car, the alcohol on my breath? Will the IRS audit me?”
The United States already leads the world in incarcerations per capita. Many of these crimes are so-called “victimless” crimes, but people go to jail, have their lives ruined, their families broken apart nevertheless. So we promote the outlaw mentality, and the result is that we end up looking over our shoulders, wondering if we're going to be the next person arrested, and fined, or worse, incarcerated for a crime that is promoted and abetted by corporations.
Yes, abetted by corporations; go out to your car and look at the speedometer; chances are it goes up to at least 110 mph. So we are sold cars that are made to break the law. In fact, we glamorize cars that are made to break the law by going over the speed limit. And this doesn't even address the fact that a car with the motor capable of going up to 75 mph, 10 miles an hour above the legal limit in most states, would need a motor only half the size of most of the cars driven in the United States, a motor that would be capable of at least 50 miles per gallon.
How about the right of peaceful assembly? That right is guaranteed in the Constitution, and yet people are violently assaulted, beaten, and worse just for exercising our our constitutional right, as we have seen in the “occupy Wall Street” demonstrations.
And this is how we become a police state, how we slowly and incrementally lose our rights, how we become a nation of lawbreakers. I'm willing to bet that not a single one of the politicians running for office right now, or even serving right now, really has a totally clean conscience.
Is this how we want to live? Is this really the land of the free and the home of the brave? Sometimes I wonder; all I know is that I'm tired of feeling like an outlaw in my own country.