Personal Liberties

Sober drivers really outdid themselves on Labor Day weekend. Following California Highway Patrol accident reports for the past decade or so, one would find that sober drivers have led their “influenced” counterparts in the holiday accident derby by a consistent 2 to 1 margin. Of this year’s 21 reported accidents, 18 involved only sober drivers.

And how do people react to this phenomenon? Thousands will quietly relinquish their constitutional protection against unwarranted searches. After so many years of Mothers Against Drunk Driving propaganda, they evidently feel that being needlessly detained in late-night checkpoints is acceptable if doing so allows law enforcement officials to ferret out a handful of influenced drivers.

Obviously, any reasonable person feels badly for those who have lost a loved one in an alcohol-related accident, but these tragedies are no more earth-shattering than deaths caused by careless or simply inept sober drivers. By no stretch of the imagination should this be misconstrued as condoning driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. My point is to show how reasonable people allow themselves to become all too willing accomplices of others who have no qualms about trashing personal liberties, as long as their own needs are served.

And the destruction left by special interests is not confined to personal freedoms. Take for example the education lobby. Administrators tell us that teachers cannot possibly devote proper attention to their students when classrooms are crammed with more than 20 pupils. Gut-wrenching predictions about illiterate students easily send taxpayers scrambling to the polls to tax themselves even more so the education system can build more facilities to house what they say is a booming student population.

Amid all the fuss, one important item seems to be getting overlooked. The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that today’s K-12 student population is “now approaching the record 49 million in 1970.” Now, it’s probably safe to assume that there were fewer schools in 1970, staffed by fewer teachers. Nevertheless, people are lining up to throw more money at an insatiable machine that already consumes more than 40% of the state’s annual spending.

BRUCE ROLAND

Ojai