Life, Liberty, and Text Messaging!

I hate it when reckless, irresponsible people ruin it for the rest of us. Remember when you were a kid? When Johnny kept talking in class or eating when he wasn’t supposed to? And what happened sometimes? EVERYONE got punished. No one had an extra recess. No one got to bring snacks to class anymore. All because of JOHNNY!!

Maybe the answer should have been to make Johnny the outcast and leave the rest of the class alone. Besides, we all ended up hating Johnny for blacklisting the whole lot of us.

This happens all the time in America at large.

I often talk about how a city in Northern California passed a Safe & Sane Fireworks ban that affected hundreds of thousands of people—all because of the reckless actions of TWO irresponsible and thoughtless youths. Why not punish THEM as severely as humanly possible and let the rest of us enjoy our Piccolo Petes and Cherry Blossoms?

We see the same sort of knee jerk reaction when it comes to driving while under the influence of a cell phone…and now text messaging is the latest whipping boy of politicians so eager to take something away from us.

We just talked on Fox Across America about how it was determined that the teen driver who got into that fatal crash last month in WesternNew York was apparently text messaging at the time of the accident. 5 people died. Why? Because of text messaging? No! Because of reckless driving. The driver was too inexperienced. She was driving too fast on a dark and winding two lane road. AND she was paying more attention to her phone than to the road.

THAT is where she made her fatal errors! I text message ALL the time. Much of that texting takes place while I am driving my car. And I have never gotten into an accident because of it. Not even a close call. Why?? Because I pay more attention to the ROAD than to the PHONE.

That driver could have been fumbling with her satellite radio. She could have been looking for a CD that fell to the floor. She could have been sharing jokes with her passengers. Any NUMBER of things could have distracted her. Time to ban vehicular channel surfing and joke telling??

One of the top “Nanny State” politicians around, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (a favorite of ours to interview on Fox Across America) has joined forces with a Republican New York Senator to sponsor a bill that would outlaw…drum roll please…text messaging while driving. Ortiz is already responsible for taking hand held cell phones away from New York drivers. Now he wants to go after text messaging.

All because of a tragedy that could very well have happened whether the driver was texting or not.

So now millions of people might have yet ANOTHER thing taken away from them. A tool that can be used for closing business deals or telling loved ones who much you miss them.

Thank goodness you probably aren’t reading this blog while driving. I wouldn’t want to have blogs taken away because you got into a wreck.