There should be a law against laws that punish the innocent majority for the transgressions of the guilty minority. Such laws violate the trust between the governors and the governed, and are a betrayal of the fact that we voted them into office. Put another way, we did not elect them so that they could abuse us.
For decades, I did most of my shopping via mail-order, and for most of that time, it went fairly smoothly. Until the government stepped in and decided that the mail-order companies should ask, not only for the customer’s shipping address, which they obviously need, but also for the customer’s billing address, and then verify that it matched up with that on file at the credit card company. Now there are many perfectly legitimate reasons why someone’s shipping address and billing address would differ. In my particular case, my bank offers a delightful bill-paying service, which wonderfully frees me from the time-wasting tedium of bill-paying. A dear friend of mine who owns her own business told me that she prefers that bills be sent to her office, so that she can dispense with the nuisance-chore of check-writing during down time, between customers, but that she, of course, wants her merchandise to go to her residence; she added that her friends who also own their own businesses do likewise. Some of the mail-order companies themselves admitted to me that many people live in one part of the country during one part of the year, and in another part for the rest of the year, and that therefore their two addresses are also out-of-sync. From the moment that this new law went into effect, I groaned aloud, because I knew that having the extra address would be an open invitation for the mail-order companies to screw up, and ship to the wrong address. Not all accepted the ill-conceived invitation, of course, but a fair number of them did, maybe a good fifth of them, which is why I rarely ever mail-order anymore; it’s simply not worth all the trouble. Nowadays, I’ve shifted to shopping via online purchasing…until the powers-that-be find a way to louse that up as well, of course. All of this damage is done, naturally, in response to the credit card fraud perpetrated by the minority.
It reminds me of when I was a kid, shopping with my mom, and a few stores’ personnel thought it within their purview to demand that we shoppers turn our packages from prior stores over to them and thus shop in their stores empty-handed, due to the occasional existence of shop-lifters. I will always treasure how proud I was of how my mother handled those clerks. She would insist in return, “I paid good money for these previous items, and they are mine. Are you going to guard them with your life as I would?? If you don’t trust me, then why should I trust you? And if it’s your policy to insult your customers the moment that they walk in the door by accusing them of being thieves, then I shall take my business elsewhere.” And we walked out of the offending store. This apparent digression puts me in mind of the previous paragraph in two ways: (1) the insult factor: implying that a customer is assumed guilty until he proves himself otherwise, and (2) in the concept of once again abusing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.
The latest bit of unfair foolishness of this sort has been committed by our state’s Motor Vehicle Administration. Years ago, when I was first deemed legally handicapped, I was offered the option of acquiring handicap-tags (with the wheelchair emblem) for my two cars, plus a blue placard (to hang on the rearview mirror) for when I ride in others’ cars. I obtained the above, and all went smoothly for years. The biggest plus, incidentally, more than the use of handicapped parking spaces, is that a car that has handicap-tags is exempt from emission-testing (as long as the car is driven fewer than 5000 miles per year). The blue placard, obviously, being mobile, cannot confer that immunity. But now, suddenly, after many years, they’ve changed the law to allow handicap-tags only on one car, plus blue placard. Even putting aside the clear absurdity that I cannot be handicapped in one car, and of sound health in the other, I challenged the MVA-clerk by saying, “A new law can apply to any new applicants, but you can’t apply it retroactively to people who already dealt with you in good faith, and to whom you issued the extra tags.” She replied, in an obvious non-sequitir, “Yes, it does.” I retorted, “Oh, that’s completely unfair! It’s on the same level with broken promises, lies, and betrayals. It’s also discriminatory, because it’s telling handicapped people that they cannot own more than one car.” She asserted, “Oh, you can own it….” I finished for her, “I just can’t protect it properly from unwelcome strangers sitting on its pristine upholstery, or having pipes shoved up its ass!” She merely stared at me blandly, so I demanded to know why such an affront of a change would’ve been made. Not surprisingly, the change was due to the same nonsense as above: the unscrupulous minority had abused the system; a few handicapped persons had lent their second cars to non-handicapped people. I insisted, “Then punish the guilty by taking away all of their handicap-tags and placards as soon as they’re caught! But don’t take it out on the rest of us!” She admitted that I had a good point, but, naturally, she could do nothing about all of this herself.
Fortunately, I have a way around all of this silliness. One of my two cars happens to be thirty years old, so on that car, I exchanged handicap-tags for historic-tags, which also exempt that car from emissions. Other than the extra hassle and expense of having to do so, I’m in the clear. But what about all of those handicapped people for whom neither car is an antique? And especially, what about those poor souls who are permanently confined to a wheelchair? (I am not). To add potential injury to insult, they’ll have to go through the ordeal of struggling out of their cars to let the intrusive strangers in, merely for the sham of emission-testing. Or, they’ll realize that they can’t take that risk for such a worthless reason, and then sorrowfully have to give up one car. (For that matter, I still can’t figure out how those poor victims in wheelchairs cope with the self-serve nonsense, so as to get their cars gassed, since most areas are now completely deprived of proper service stations. This is just one more affront to an already beleaguered life for those poor folks. The cheapskates who pushed so hard for those silly self-serve stations to take over everywhere must have forgotten that we’re not all big strapping hulks, nor would we want to be). Either way, the innocent handicapped majority is being abused because of the actions of the guilty handicapped minority.
When I was a teacher, many years ago, it was drummed into all of us that we must never punish an entire class for the misbehavior of a few. Now, if we know the importance of that policy in a classroom, why can’t we also know it out in the real world?
