For Your Safety

“It’s for your safety.”

I was told this by a security guard at the emergency room of a Colorado Springs hospital.  Did you know emergency rooms need security guards?  And not just a guard.  For me to visit someone in the emergency room, I had to pass a TSA-like security screening, which required me to empty my pockets, take off my belt, and walk through a metal detector.  Alas, I was found to be with “weapons” as you can see below.

Terribly scary and awesomely dangerous “weapons” (grid is made of 1″ squares)

The first “weapon” is a folding utility knife.  The next “weapon” is a glorified toothpick.  Seriously, I use the toothpick in this Swiss army knife most often, followed by the tiny scissors.  Is anyone in this country really afraid of utility knives anymore?  And why call these weapons?  I’ve never used either as a weapon, even to fend off rabid squirrels.  Good thing I didn’t bring in a concealed pistol, I guess.

Anyway, the security guard picked these two items out of the bin and tucked them into an envelope, giving me the receipt.  “It’s for your safety,” he said, clearly not terribly convinced himself.  (He wouldn’t look me in the eye with me glaring at him like I was.)

Quick pause.  It’s at this point I decided NOT to say what was on my mind, but I’ll write it here to get it off my chest.  The reason I decided not to say this was because this guy was doing a job someone was paying him to do—and he clearly wasn’t the one making the rules, nor was he in the position to change them.  No need to shoot the messenger.  Or stab him to death with toothpicks.

“My safety, huh?  Do you really believe that disarming anyone of their ‘weapons’ is for their safety?  Weapons have two functions—offense and defense.  People like me use weapons ONLY in defense and NEVER initiate force against anyone.  Therefore, any ‘weapons’ I have with me serve as defense and not offense.  How can it possibly be true that taking away a ‘weapon’ of defense is for my safety?”

Of course, it cannot.  That’s preposterous.  I’ve written about this topic previously, so there’s no use in my repeating it here.

But one thing really bothers me.  Why was this guard instructed to tell people that taking away their “weapons” was for their protection?  Who made up such a lie, and how could anyone be conned into believing such a thing?

I see this as a disturbing trend in our culture.  More and more lies are being told (and, ostensibly, being accepted) in and among our culture.  How do we square the many lies of broadcast propaganda with the “land of the free” and the “home of the brave”?  (Yes, I’m aware this is an election year.)

Last August, our tax-cheating treasury secretary assured us there was “no risk” that the credit rating of the U.S. would be downgraded from AAA rankings.  Immediately following this obvious lie was the announcement of our downgraded credit rating by Standard & Poor’s.  “No risk” now apparently means “imminent risk”.

The debt problem in Greece has been taken care of and there is no reason for concern.  And now, of course, we see the debt problem in Greece has NOT been taken care of and the unity of the Euro nations is in jeopardy of harsh break-up, and perhaps war.  Banks foolish enough to invest in European “sovereign debt”, such as Jon Corzine’s M.F. Global and recently J.P. Morgan are now either bankrupt or soon-to-be bankrupt (or bailed out—again—which is far worse).

Our corrupted politicians/bankers/regulators/reporters are using propaganda remarkably similar to Orwell’s “newspeak“.  And now, of course, we have similar disinformation coming from security guards in emergency rooms.  At what point does such disinformation permeate society such that it can no longer return to honesty?

Clearly, we can no longer be trusted with the freedom  to decide whether or not to harm one another.  Or even ourselves.  It simply wouldn’t be “safe”.  And while this may be true of a select few of our population, we’ll need to enforce “safety” on everyone without exception.

To be sure, when we begin to value safety over freedom, freedom will be truly dead.  I expect this will be met with roaring applause.