GA- We've lost all sense

12-6-2008 Georgia:

THIS NATION, THIS STATE and this community are losing the ability to detect when they have zoomed out of the bounds of simple common sense. It shows by their enforcement of policies and laws.

Locally, for example, elderly men and women who purchase tobacco products in certain convenience stores are told to produce an identification that shows their birth date before the sale can be completed. Even though it is profusely obvious that they are at least 18, the legal age to buy cigarettes and the like, they must dig in their wallets or pocketbooks to prove it.

Armed and uniformed police officers are instructed to do the same. When is the last time someone at a convenience store saw a 17-year-old sworn police officer?

Yes, anyone of questionable age, like someone who looks borderline 18 or younger than the legal age, should be carded. That makes perfect sense. But taking a blanket approach to age determination, treating people who are obviously in the autumn of their years as if they were a younger or older teen, is wholly absurd. It’s a policy that lacks common sense, even if the flawed motivation or defective objective is “to be fair” to everyone.

It’s not being fair. It’s being ridiculous.

There are Georgia’s sex-offender laws, too — again, like the ID policy, a blanket approach to treating those who have committed a sexual offense. The law requires sex offenders to register with the community in which they reside and to comply with certain rules, like living a certain distance away from places where youth normally gather.

By now, everyone is familiar with the case where an adult woman has been told to relocate because she committed an indecent sexual act at the age of 17 with a 16-year-old boy. She is suing the state for being lumped in the same category as rapists and adults who molest children.

Anyone with the least bit of common sense would know performing a sexual act at ages 16 and 17 is nowhere near the same as a 40-year-old man molesting a 7-year-old girl. They should not be treated the same, yet they are in this state, and that’s wrong.

Then there’s the revelation that the federal government has been mailing blanket payments, millions of dollars in farm subsidies, to millionaires, including ones who do not live in this country. All totaled, some 2,702 recipients of the federal assistance have incomes in the high millions of dollars. For bureaucrats who don’t know this already, they don’t need the financial help.

No company that depended on a profit for survival would dare have done anything like that. Only government employees who can tap into unlimited resources — like our earnings and incomes — would act without common sense and send checks for thousands of dollars to just anyone.

We need to get back to some basic rules of common sense in this country, and we need to do it before the rest of us are no longer able to tell the difference.

..News Source.. by Brunswick (Ga.) News