Friday, October 1, 2010

No Good Deed.....

One of the things I find most frustrating about America today is the inability to understand the difference between the letter and spirit of the law. We routinely set free dangerous criminals on some minor technicality while punishing well meaning citizens for actions that no rational thinking person would call a crime.

I've already written about this subject this summer when a 7 year old Portland, Oregon girl had her lemonade stand shut down until she could come up with $120 to get a proper license. Licensing laws are important to ensure the safety of consumers when it comes to food but the laws were written for actual businesses--not a 7 year old with a pitcher of lemonade.

Yet we keep hearing of these situations in which the people who should be able to see what is a clear violation and what common sense says is struggle to figure out what to do. The most recent example is a high school football coach in St. Cloud, Florida who was suspended for the unimaginable crime of taking in a homeless student.

I understand there are rules governing what can be offered to a player to prevent schools from "paying" students to come to their particular school. Schools can't offer or provide free or reduced-rate housing in exchange for students attending their school. Was this rule really made to keep homeless kids on the street? Maybe, instead, it was made to prevent the kind of under the table arrangement I just described.

It is maddening that we now live in a bureaucratic nightmare in which public "servants" enforce laws and rules without a modicum of common sense or basic reasoning. Even worse, it often seems as though these same people feel the need to wield their power for all to see in each questionable situation.

What may be worse is that we're losing our outrage at the idiocy of it all. We hear these story and we shake our heads and think, "That's stupid." However, I have to wonder if these seemingly small and isolated instances aren't contributing to the overall decline of rational society.

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