It takes a village to raise a child, as Hillary Clinton put it in her idiotic tome some years back, but it takes a government to wrench itself from the bounds of common sense. Welcome to Britain, where parents are assumed pedophiles and locked out of playgrounds until proven otherwise.
Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.
Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.
Watford Council was branded a ‘disgrace’ yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.
I try to deal foremost in facts – I leave the apocalyptic rhetoric to others, especially Glenn Beck. But leave it to Britain to make Beck and his ilk look all the more wiser. Defending your life, even in your own home, may mean serving life in prison – quite the ironic set of rules, especially given Britain’s traditional highbrow leniency toward criminals. It’s a country where most citizens are summarily trashed by its ruling class as boarish and worse for supporting the right to defend themselves, and denied every right to do so at every juncture. Imagine America with the caste system in Indian, all those Ivy League lawyers at the top, and you have Britain. We all know what Bill Buckley said about Harvard.
Britain’s government is at war with its own people. Whether over reaches of political correctness, state nanny-ship, or the news that the country’s Labour party encouraged mass illegal immigration to stock its own votes and disenfranchise its own citizenry, this is a government supported by a people – not the other way around.
Have we gone this far? Not yet, but we could be – ask a single dad what it’s like getting permission from a court to have a young daughter sleep over at the house. One political party has no problem throwing someone in jail for not having medical insurance. But there’s hope out there. Under normal circumstances, Obama would be finished with his agenda and riding it out until 2012. Now he’s sweating it daily, unable to pass key legislation and resorting to thrashing at media. Not because of some staunch opposition in the House or Senate, not because of a scandal, but because of grassroots opposition. A leaderless revolution of sorts. That so much has stalled is a testament to the founders and their system. It’s a testament to a people whose devotion to simple concepts like rugged individualism will endure long after socialism is dead.
Is it too late for us? No, but it could be across the Atlantic. Mark Steyn doesn’t see a future Britain where liberty is a priority.
I keep getting e-mails saying, “People will reach a tipping point and they’ll no longer put up with this stuff.” I doubt it. Right now the way to bet is that once free societies will retreat incrementally, one trivial step after another, into a totalitarian hell.
A touch apocalyptic? Yes. Lets give it a few years before we write off rationality as a byproduct of old fashioned notions of democracy. But there is good news – at least someplace in Europe won’t allow Roman Polanski to wander unabated.
One of the schools my kids attended would not allow adults on campus until they had a fingerprint on file and had run a criminal record check. I also think I had to do something similar to chaperone events with the Boy Scouts.
Reminds me of the South Park episode in which the parents went crazy trying to keep their kids from being kidnapped. It also featured Mongorians,
Those zany Brits. It’s like they have all the negatives of Communism only with none of the positives. Communist always have the coolest propaganda posters, not to mention gray flannel is very slimming. You honestly do have to wonder where the tipping point is.