I KNOW MY RIGHTS!

Blog number 432 ******* 19 October 2010

In an "On This Day" column in my daily newspaper, I learned that today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's arrest and imprisonment for parole violation on a traffic violation charge.

I heard a cop on the reality show, "Cops" say, in reference to a car they were following, "We'll follow him until we see him make a traffic violation, then we'll stop him."

I left work one day to find an MP writing me a ticket. Evidently someone had complained because where I parked my Volkswagen van, the complainant couldn't see around me to safely pull out into traffic.

Now, I was parked legally. The MP told me that he looked all over my vehicle trying to find something illegal. He said he was just giving up when he noticed I didn't have a front license plate, which was not legal in California. This was my ticket. When he told me this, he acted and sounded like he had accomplished a wonderful thing. I even had the strong impression that he thought that I thought he was a pretty great policeman. He wanted me to join in his joy at his accomplishment in giving me a ticket for what was essentially parking in a legal parking zone.

All in all, what all this means to me is that if a cop wants to arrest me, there are enough illegal activities that I might do that all he has to do is wait and watch.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves, this common acceptance of cultural conditioning - such as the one that says "The Constitution guarantees me this and that."

The United States Constitution actually guarantees nobody anything. The people who own the military interpret for you what the Constitution guarantees you. If they say you can't do this, then you can't. If they say you must do this, then you must. What you think the Constitution says is moot. You can argue, but good luck with that.

We are all slaves to what we think. Ain't THAT weird? And if you think that cultural conditoning is not pervasive in every part of your existence, you are badly mistaken. We are constantly operating under mistaken ideas about what is real and what is true.

Oh well.