Freedom Kills

Today I received an email from a friend. It said something about sending this link on to any of your loved ones and so on. I clicked on the attached link and there was a video of all those drunk driving commercials from the last few years. You know... The ones where the guys car is full of vodka and olives floating around? Awesome idea that commercial was for some ad man somewhere. It's a good thing I didn't see a commercial like that in 1983 because I'm sure I would have ran down to the hardware store and bought 20 tubes of caulk for my car doors.
So I sat, thinking about this video. The guy who had sent it on to me was an ex drinker. He'd been in Alcoholics Anonymous for about 15 years. Should I tell him what I thought of it? Hmmm.... I finally started typing. Yes, I believe I have to tell him what I think. --"zoom zoom"

Yeah, now that we've increased our police force so that the entire country resembles Russia, we can call it a day. These commercials are propaganda at it's worst.

Freedom kills, and Freedom is NOT SAFE.

That statement might not seem to make sense, but it's as true as it gets. You can't have both "safety" and "freedom".

I drank a half a beer one night about six years ago, and a cop pulled me over by the motel. POINT ZERO SIX!!!??? A fuckin' half a beer? So he could have legally arrested me for "impaired" and if I had drank the full beer, I would have probably paid about $3,000 bucks when it was all said and done, not to mention all the crap I would have had to go through. All for HALF of one beer. The thing that saved me was that I never admitted to drinking a drop of anything. If I had admitted, the judge would have said, "You were drinking?"
"Yep".
"And you were driving?"
"Yep"
"GUILTY MUTHER$%$%R!"

...because that's the way it works. Not everyone is an alcoholic. Some of us merely drink a beer from time to time. That's the problem with DUI's in America today... Most of the people getting arrested aren't even intoxicated. They are just "over the limit" and the limit IS NOT high. Drinking alcohol in America is legal. Driving "drunk" should be illegal, but when you get government involved with ANYTHING they are going to screw it up royal of course. Now, it's all about the money. It's not about safety. It's about getting two new cop cars per year, and two new officers every year, and HUNDREDS, yes hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars per year nationwide.

What people SHOULD be looking for is tougher laws for drunk drivers. Not "over the limit" drivers, but actual drunken drivers. Right now it's all about money. You get a DUI, you pay the fine, pay the counselor, pay the jail, pay pay pay.... How about 10 years for someone who runs into someone and LIFE if you kill someone? All the studies I've seen in countries where this type of punishment is doled out shows that it is MORE effective than what we are doing here.
Effective is what I'm after. Not showy. Right now, we are just politically correct. When I moved to Wyoming in 1977, my dad used to tip his Coors at the officer in the police car next to him while stopped at the light! No open container law? Can anyone imagine that? That was before the Feds FORCED states into passing laws.

I just talked to a friend of mine named Jason. He was walking home from the Hopscotch bar in little ol Ft. Pierre with two friends when three weird-o meth head types jumped out of the bushes and beat his two friends over the head with pieces of asphalt. Once they got them down, they began kicking them in the head with their boots. One guy has to have facial reconstruction surgery. Jason was lucky, in that he was 30 yards behind his friends when they were attacked, and so he avoided getting the crap beaten out of himself too. When the cops showed up, Jason told them where the kids had went, but the cops would not go after them. He said they seemed fairly unconcerned with it all. "We just need information at this point" they kept telling him. In the end, ONE kid is getting two counts of agravated assault. This typically carries little or no jail time. The other two kids were never caught because the cops never went after them.

Why am I telling this story?

Because the reason, which is plain to me, that the police in Ft Pierre never went after the kids is because THERE'S NO MONEY IN IT. That and to follow after the kids might have been somewhat dangerous, (something a REAL cop would do, and not a tax collector) and would have taken the cops away from their REAL purpose, which is to pull people over and smell their breath. Cops used to actually serve the public and protect the public. Now they just make fuckin money. It's bullshit. I can see that and I don't even DRINK!

As far as I'm concerned they can take these commercials and file them in their ass. ha. I've been pulled over 15 times in Pierre when I had that old car. SEVEN of the times I was pulled over I had to take a breathalizer, even though I hadn't even had ANYTHING to drink. Another time, I had half a beer, ate a few pieces of pizza and decided I better dive over to my business and cover up my boat and blew POINT ZERO SIX when the legal limit is point zero eight. The funny part about it is that once I got a 20 thousand dollar pickup, and now a 30 thousand dollar one, I've NEVER been pulled over. So this would basically tell a person that poor people are getting the shaft, and it also says that they pull people over for no reason, to make money. People with 30 thousand dollar trucks can AFFORD lawyers. Of the 15 times I've been pulled over, all of them were "you swerved" or "crossed the center line" or some bogus bullshit. One cop actually told me "We just gotta check everyone" and didn't even say why he'd pulled me over. I don't know about anyone else, but that is Russia. That's not the USA.

My wife got pulled over by a cop for no reason and I was right in front of her. I turned around and asked him why he'd pulled her over and he said she had crossed the center line, which she had not. I called and bitched at the city and threatened to sue, and a few weeks later he was fired, partly because of it. The guy in the $500 dollar car wouldn't have been able to do what I did. The $500 dollar guy doesn't play golf with the cheif of police. Right? It's total bullshit.

When I was a kid, I hung out in Spearfish. We were all big drinkers. Of the three hundred or so kids I partied with, (my Prom Queen AND Homecoming Queen girlfriend drank a fifth of bacardi EVERY weekend) none of them ever got in a car wreck while drinking, and what's more, none of them that I've ever heard of have ever gotten killed in the last 30 years! A great number of them are like me, in that they do not drink except on special occasions. Numbers are only as good as the people writing them down. Just in the last ten years in Pierre, I have heard of MORE drunken driving deaths than I had ever heard of in 25 years over in Wyoming and the Black Hills before they started this anti drinking campaign. There are kids dropping like flies now, because they have to drive, since the cops have cracked down on drinking parties so much they can't do it in the open anymore. They can't go to so and so's parents house and drink, so they drive way way out in the middle of nowhere and do it. And then they drive.

Freedom kills. Freedom is not SAFE.