Some Bad Ideas

Sometimes you see something and you recognize immediately that it’s not a good idea. This happened to me the other day when I was watching a Cleveland Indians exhibition game on television. Yes, I really do that.

When Cleveland was at bat somebody got the bright idea to play an audio clip of a bugle call to which the crowd in attendance was supposed to respond by shouting, “Charge!” The actual response was, to say the least, uninspired and the announcer allowed that maybe the spring training crowd wasn’t as into it as the crowd would be in the regular season, but I don’t think that was the problem.
I think it’s a bad idea to play a bugle call for a cavalry charge at an INDIANS game. Whose side did you think the crowd would be on anyway? They’re Cleveland fans, they’re for the Indians. You don’t play a bugle call to inspire the Indians, do you? See what I mean? That was a bad idea right from the get go.

Here’s another one. I’m driving down the road last Saturday on a comparatively warm, officially spring day. Out on the sidewalk is a man with a white cane out for a walk. Good idea. But he’s wearing earphones. Bad idea. I’m not trying to dump on the visually challenged community and I never go for one of my walks without my iPod but if your vision is already bad enough to merit a white cane don’t you think you ought to be paying attention to the sounds of a busy street? Another one that should have been identified as a bad idea right away.

Sometimes something seems like a good idea until you realize that the law of unintended consequences has come into play. Or as we put it here, “nothing causes problems like solutions.” The 18th amendment to the constitution was to control the influence of demon rum. While almost everyone has some story about a funny thing that happened to someone while drunk, we’re finally learning that there’s not much funny that can happen when you put a drunk behind the wheel. And, truth be told, people who are drunk are a lot less funny to people who aren’t drunk than they like to think.

So, okay, the creation of prohibition seemed like a good idea at the time. Ratification began with Mississippi in January of 1918 and was certified before the end of January, 1919. Probably the only time since the Civil War that Mississippi has been ahead of anybody about anything. Rhode Island, to its eternal credit, was the only state to reject the amendment. This bright idea brought us such things as “bathtub gin” and “near beer,” artificially concocted substitutes which were about as good an idea as your average home meth lab is today, maybe with less quality control. It was said at the time that whoever named it “near beer” was a lousy judge of distance. My mother theorized once that it was bad home-made booze that killed her father.

The other problem caused by this solution was the growth of organized crime. Outlawing alcohol didn’t make the demand for it go away, it just made the supply go underground. Whenever there’s a demand for a product or a service somebody will find a way to meet it, and probably at a profit if they have any business sense at all. So America practically handed a cash cow to people willing to engage in illegal activity and said, “Here you go. Milk it for all it’s worth.”

Did you know that of the 27 amendments to the constitution that have been ratified ONLY the 18th was repealed? And once we got around to it we did it pretty quickly too. The 21st amendment repealed the 18th and was ratified in less than 10 months. South Carolina was the only state to outright reject the 21st amendment by the way.
All of this came to mind when I heard on the news that New Hampshire’s House of Representatives has passed a law to allow medical marijuana in the Granite State. It goes to the Senate next and if it passes there it’s on to the Governor. John Lynch is a very popular guy in these parts because, as a friend of mine pointed out, he’s the best darn high school principal we’ve ever had.

Which is a lot of what the Governor does in New Hampshire. He shows up at the smile-and-wave events, looks stern when there’s something involving the law, and is always appropriately somber at an important funeral or disaster. He’s a good barometer of the public sentiment on the issues and he does it without getting caught looking at polls.

Not because I use it, I don’t - I’m flaky enough already, but we need to legalize marijuana and probably some other drugs because it’s obvious that the whole drug war is a disaster along the lines of the 18th amendment. We’re legislating against an activity that an awful lot of people want to participate in that doesn’t really harm anyone but the user.

Protecting us from ourselves never really works. Part of freedom is the right to make bad choices and then having to live with them … unless she changes the locks and throws your stuff into the street.