Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Pretty Pictures...just because I can.




When Did Adults....

When did adults stop being adults?

Right now, in Austin, the powers that be want to set up "sobriety check points," whereby the police stake out a certain place, bottlenecking traffic so that they can ostensibly catch drunks. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. But, is it really?

In most, if not all states, the law says that the people responsible for drunks who drive is the establishment where they got drunk and the people who actually served them the drinks. This approach takes responsibility for their condition out of the hands of the drunk and makes whomever enabled him to get drunk, his keepers. WTF?

When did we stop holding *adults* responsible for what they do?

Don't give me that tired tripe about alcoholism being a "disease." It's not. It's a lifestyle choice. If you must drink, and you know you drink to excess, stay home. It's very simple. You can get as drunk as you want to, still, in your own home. Most people who get drunk on a regular basis know they do it. I mean, come on...if, by the time you are 30 years old if you wake up with a headache every morning, wondering how you got home, you're probably an alkie.

Taking responsibility for their actions out of the hands of the person who is actually *doing* the behavior isn't a boon to the drunk, nor is it a boon to society to hold his enablers responsible for his behavior. Checkpoints and prosecuting bartenders, who by the way, are subject to the orders of the person who pays them (the owner/manager) and are just trying to earn a living is not the way to keep people from driving drunk. Stricter sentencing guidelines will. Not being able to buy your way out of a DWI with an obscenely expensive lawyer who has a couple of judges in his pocket, or plead it down to a slap on the wrist, will make the act of driving drunk alot less attractive to the drunks who do it.

Infantilizing the citizens is a slippery slope to the government plantation. Allowing law enforcement style pat downs in airports and random "alcohol" checkpoints violate our constitutional right, endowed by our *Creator,* not the federal or state government, to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. This is the first baby step to the police being able to randomly search your house for drugs or contraband guns (or heck, anything they want just so they can look around) because it's against the law to have such things.

I, for one, am sick of it. Put personal responsibility back where it belongs. On the *adults* that do it. I am NOT my brother's keeper unless my brother is gonna listen to me when I say stop, which isn't bloody likely to happen in this lifetime.