It seems like it gets harder to celebrate Independence Day every year.
This is the last year I will be able to buy the light bulbs I prefer to use. Next year, unless the Republicans muster up some courage, I will be buying bulbs that look like the cones I used to buy at the Zesto Drive In as a kid. Chock full of mercury I have to call HAZMAT if I break one. They cost more, provide poorer light, take longer to warm up, and last far less longer than promised. Why don’t I have a choice of the light bulbs I use? Why do I and millions of other Americans have to stock our basements with bulbs to exercise our rights as Americans?
Why do I have to buy gasoline with ethanol in it while third world countries have starving people? It is to create a summer blend to reduce emissions in warmer weather. But, knock sensors on cars have prevented that for twenty years. So, it’s to keep or get votes in farm states. It doesn’t save any foreign oil purchases and it adds carbon to the environment. I’m doing this to help fat cat corporate farmers? Why is this different than corporate jets? Plus, it’s far more money.
I am thankful this Fourth of July that I don’t live in San Francisco. They are banning circumcision. How bad is that? Plus, the whole state has banned charcoal grills, a Fourth of July tradition for we die hard purists. Now they are tying to ban the sale of pets. For the Jewish population, pet lovers, and traditional grillers, where is their freedom? Who decides what is banned and not banned in the city by the bay?
We have the Feds banning everything they can ban and mandating what they like. We have states picking up the slack and banning more and mandating more. We have the cities jumping in on the act. And, in some cases the worst threat to freedom, homeowners’s associations and their CC&R’s. They tell you what color you can paint your house, whether you can park a car overnight in your own driveway, and what bushes you can plant in your yard.
Combine all this help we get and it’s a tsunami of insults to our way of living. It’s no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It’s the land where the few decide what we need and force us to like it. Isn’t that why our forefathers left England to begin with?
