I’ve always thought that safety and freedom were somewhat incompatible goals. You can have a very safe society, but next to no rights. (A police state.) Or you can go the opposite way, and have a very free society, one in which no one can stop me from detonating nuclear bombs. But there’s a middle ground, I think, where we have a good deal of freedom, but are also pretty safe.
I’ve always thought that airports were a good example of starting to give up too much freedom to get a little safety. While I’m certainly not eager to give up safety, I could do with a slightly less-strict set of policies in airports.
But here’s an even better example. A town in Arkansas is drawing criticism for what seems to be a non-stop curfew, in which anyone on the streets is stopped and investigated. (It’s not terribly clear to me what’s meant by the curfew, though: I think of a curfew as it being illegal to be in public during a certain time, so a 24/7 curfew would basically mean you couldn’t leave your house. And they kind of suggest that, but it seems people are also going on with their daily lives?)
Is it safe? Very much so, it seems. Violence is way down, and they’ve made lots of arrests. But would you want to live there, where walking to the store was cause for the police to detain you? (The telling quote is, “The citizens deserve peace, that some infringement on constitutional rights is OK…”)
OK that seems completely over the top. It does sound like there is a crime problem but still …
Someone said something about no one should be out at 3AM well that is dumb. What about people coming home from trips or working late or just wanting to play some late night basketball?
Agreed! (And I used to work until closing over summers, which meant I’d come home at 1 or 2 many mornings…)
Plus, I thought it was weird that they used the, “No one should be out at 3am” bit to explain why they have a 24/7 curfew.
Maybe it is a local thing. In Boston the T stops running rather early in the evening (1 AM perhaps) where as in New York at 1 AM a lot of people are out and about going to work and to eat and otherwise enjoy themselves.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Ad praesens ova cras pullis sunt meliora.
Matt you’s seems a Non Sequitur. If you are looking for the Latin for chickens coming home to roost I think that is something else. 🙂
Who will watch the watcher fits right in though.
Haha, you have no idea how disappointed I was earlier when no one saw my comment.
Katherine’s post made perfect sense and was a good point. But of course I couldn’t reply, “Good point.” So I spent a while trying to find Your Mom jokes in Latin, but all I could find was Latino Your Mom Jokes.
So I settled for, “Eggs today are better than chickens tomorrow.”