TheAgitator.com
A Schwartz as Big as Anyone Else’s
Thursday, July 15th, 2004Someone needs to buy Carol Schwartz a drink.
Okay, so the D.C. city councilwoman erred a bit by sponsoring the cell phone ban, but she did almost singlehandedly push back the proposed smoking ban, and now she’s casting some much-needed skepticism on the District’s speed cameras, which are strategically placed not in areas where speeders are making roads and neighborhoods unsafe, but in areas where speeding is pretty much required for safe driving, and thus in areas most likely to generate revenue.
That’s a good start. Hehe, if only we were to repeal every law that served no other purpose than to generate revenue, methinks we might be close to that elusive “freedom” thing everyone talks about so much.
Funny…if Schwartz applied the same logic to her lame cellphone ban (does it make anyone safer?), then I think she’d find herself in a conundrum.
Speaking of freedom, though: what is it with these “rememberfreedom.org” commercials? I looked it up, and it’s such a bunch of buzzword-laden tripe. It seems to operate under the naive assumption that, as long as you’re not being tortured or jailed for your ethnicity or herded into refugee camps, then you’re “free”. In America, we are not free. Every day, we are less and less free.
The most ironic part is that those “rememberfreedom.org” commercials are typically followed by another ad council spot about historic preservation. Yet, historic preservation, at the hands of the state beaurocracy, is one of the biggest assaults on freedom that we have today. I’m an architect, and here in Charlottesville, VA, there’s an old dumpy trailer court that Habitat for Humanity wants to build some duplexes on. But there’s an old run-down timber-framed house, from the mid-20th century or so, on the property, and the city has said that it is “historic”. How sick is that? Habitat tries to perform charitable acts to give people a roof over their head, and the People’s Republic of Charlottesville, as my boss calls it, brings down the axe on them.
Freedom? Ha.
But I digress…
You just reminded me of my recent bizarre experience as the only person in a Texas piano bar to look confused and awkward when “where at least I know I’m free” came around again in the chorus. Much like the word “liberal,” I can only believe that the word “free” (and its derivatives) has been seriously compromised.