Protecting us?

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: June 24, 2008

In this country – town, county, state – we seemingly have rules for everything. They are mostly pre-emptive measures, which prevent us from hurting ourselves and force us to conform to the whims’ of lawmakers.
In the grand scheme of life – and death – many of these laws are nonsensical, trivial and downright meaningless.
For example, our cars must be registered and we must be licensed, our homes must be assessed and inspected before we move in, our children must have their shots and register for school, our pets must wear tags and, in many cases, we need a special license to work. In some neighborhoods, our grass must be kept at a certain length and our trees neatly trimmed. In some places people can smoke only in their homes, and we can’t ride our bicycles without a helmet. New York even has a law that requires restaurants to list the caloric and nutritional elements for all items on their menus.
The list of what we can and can’t do is as exhaustive as it is troublesome for many Americans, especially those who value their civil liberties and their right to choose. The idea behind all of these rules and regulations, of course, is to protect us from ourselves, which runs counter to what we believe were the intentions of our founding fathers – to enact laws only that discourage and punish people from infringing on the rights of others.
But this zest to regulate is fraught with problems, not the least of which is that it simply doesn’t work.
People still get hurt, and they continue to take advantage of those who are weaker and more vulnerable than them. A defenseless baby, according to reports, was beaten to death at an Eden motel Thursday. The boy, whose permanently disabled father is in jail for pulling a gun on police officers, was 11 months old. Another man, Luther Martin, is charged in the infant’s death. The boy’s mother, police say, left the baby alone with Martin while she stepped out for a cigarette.
No laws exist to license people to become parents, and we pray that none are ever enacted. Still, had the baby, Antonio Devon Bridges, survived, the government would have stepped in and possibly removed the baby from the home. But the baby died, and there was no law, no rule, no regulation that could stop it.