Here's My Point: Land of the Free, Sort of

By Ron Fitzwater

Sometimes you hear something that makes you think. Last week, I heard something that has given me pause and, after several days of turning it over and over again in my mind, I have decided that, for me at least, what I heard is just unacceptable. The fact that I can't do anything to change it just makes it worse.

Before moving forward, I want to make it clear that I am not a smoker. I used to smoke a pipe but since I haven't been able to locate a decent tobacconist since moving to the High Country I gave it up as a regular pleasure.

Last week as most of you know, our local State Congressional Representative Cullie Tarleton made the comment that "Public safety trumps personal freedom."

Tarleton was speaking in the context of defending why he co-sponsored N.C. House Bill 2, a bill that will ban smoking in all restaurants and bars in the state beginning in January of 2010. While on the surface the bill seems like a sound idea in that it is intended to make public places safer for everyone, it does take away the individual business owner's right to run an establishment how they want. No second hand smoke for the non-smokers to deal with may sound good to many, but what if a business is willing to sacrifice non-smoker business in the interest of catering to a mostly smoking clientele? Does the government have a right to say they can't? According to the State of North Carolina, the answer is yes.

Smokers these days seem to be looked at as if they are some type of criminals or diseased pariah by the granola-munching health nuts, so it seemed like an easy bill to put forward. But Tarleton, and the other lawmakers who push bills like this, are off the track when it comes to what we as Americans have come to expect as, well, Americans. It makes me have to ask, since when in this country has it become acceptable to put anything before personal freedom and where will it, or should it, stop? I personally think the persecution of smokers won't stop and I'll have to start driving my smoking friends and relations to the Canadian border to score black-market Marlboros.

However, since our legislators have opened Pandora's box, let's take a look at what other legal activities only participated in by some, but not all, and are permitted via personal freedom that could and maybe should become illegal-for public safety purposes, of course.

Let's stay with restaurants and bars for a second. Alcohol should be done away with in these businesses entirely because of the dangers to people not only in the establishments in question through the threat of drunken violence, but also those who just happen to be driving or walking on or near a road that an alcohol impaired driver is also on. Like the commercial says "buzzed driving is drunk driving." Since drunk driving caused just under 30,000 deaths last year, 1,794 were children under 14-years-old, doesn't the state have a responsibility to stop alcohol sales to protect the non-drinkers? Also, it needs to be factored in how many people die in barbecue dust-ups because of alcohol sales in stores both private and state owned. Of course that would mean closing all state Alcohol Beverage Control stores since the booze sold there could cause the deaths of the innocent from a drinker who is already cranky that he or she has to drink at home because he or she can't smoke in a bar.

Of course not just drunk drivers kill with cars, so do road raging drivers, drivers who talk on cell phones while driving (there are restrictions for under 18 drivers and bus drivers), drivers who change the radio station while driving or roll down windows, look at billboards, drive on unfamiliar roads and so on. Since we can't stop those activities unless we outlaw cell phones, car radios and billboards, we need, for the public's safety, to make driving illegal.

Nearly 42,000 Americans die each year due to automobile accidents. It is just too dangerous. Not to mention the benefit to the environment. And not just cars are a danger on highways, either. People should be kept away from roads no matter what vehicle they operate. Cars are bad, but they at least provide more protection than is afforded for bicyclists, skate-boarders, hikers or even horse riders. All those activities pose dangers to the operator and any one they come into contact with, so for public safety they must be stopped.

Use of public lands needs to be stopped too because of the risk to the public from forest fires and the risk to rescue personnel who must look for lost hikers.

Another legal activity that should be outlawed, because of the danger to public safety, is using heat or flame of any kind in the home or workplace. People die daily from home fires, fires at work and out of control brush fires, not to mention the damage to people down wind who are forced to breath the smoke and, on occasion, from accidents involving emergency vehicles and drivers too distracted by cell phones, radios and the rest, to notice them.

Of course, any list of legal activities that need to be made illegal obviously must include operating any fast-food joint that does not serve only natural, healthy foods. French fries and pizza must go, tacos must go, ice cream and other fattening foods must go. Eggs must go because of the cholesterol; bacon must go because of the fat, along with all real meat for the same reason.

Around the work site, ladders or scaffolding in public places must be done away with, someone could fall and land on an innocent, killing them. For that matter, no buildings can be allowed to be over one story tall; something could fall and kill an old person.

As well, air travel must be added to the list and, in fact, all aircraft must be done away with since when they fall out of the sky they might land on innocent people who don't fly and who would never have any contact with an airplane save having one inconsiderately fall on them.

I hear people all the time complaining about how the government is taking away our freedoms through warrantless wiretaps, the PATRIOT Act, police car stops that violate Fourth Amendment protections and FCC regulations that limit what networks can broadcast to their viewers, but the same people who will raise a fuss over the government-maybe-listening in on their phone calls are just fine with the rights of their neighbor to use a legal substance when and where they want is taken away.

The answer is simple to this, had anyone one in the State House asked me. You allow business owners to do what they wish in their businesses. If they want to allow smokers they should be able to. They do have to pay their business taxes, don't they?

The most important thing about America's founding was the right to be free. Our leaders have forgotten how important that is and most of our fellow countrymen don't seem to care. Let them take away the little freedoms and they will take all of them eventually.

Barry Goldwater said, "That a government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have." However, they can only do it if we let them, and we are letting them.