Seat Belt Check Lanes are Stupid

Note: Charles Martin Cosgriff, smart aleck extrordinaire that he is, doubles as the Wayne County (MI) Conservative Examiner on examiner.com He likes this too much to dare alter it.

While your Wayne County Conservative Examiner was tooling westwardly along Michigan Avenue in southwest Detroit early yesterday evening, a little after 7 in the PM, he could not help but notice the harsh stare of the Detroit Police Officer boring into his person as he made his way. It caused him to shrink away with fear, in fact. The officer had his squad car parked in the left turn lane, which was truly inconvenient. Your WCCE was wanting to hang a left into the parking lot of his favorite Little Caesars for the sake of a couple Hot and Ready pizzas, and perhaps some Crazy Bread as well. You know, that delightfully doughy bread painted with garlic, and with what we perceive are cheese bits of a sort as a kind of crust. Yet thanks to the officer ever so diligent at his duty, it was necessary to drive a block past the restaurant, to make a left and circle yet another block in returning to Michigan to turn right into the waiting LC. It was really quite distressing, for your WCCE had spent several hours doing yard work, a chore in itself, and was really quite hungry for that wonderful American specialty colloquially known as beer and pizza. Yet his well earned repast was delayed so insultingly because he had happened upon a seat belt check lane, an area set aside so that the City of Detroit could be on the lookout for those vile and despicable criminals who had not buckled up. Horrid, disgusting felons they are.

Really now. We have to wonder whether the whole plot was merely a ploy for the city to earn a few extra bits of coin. Detroit is, after all, suffering deep financial woes. Yet if only that might have been the case, the officers perhaps may have been cut a little slack. As it is, they were seeking out the truly evil people who may have dared motored along a Detroit thoroughfare without having availed themselves of the proverbial 'click it or ticket'. My, but those government agents as so able to turn a phrase.

Of course, one really can harbor no ill will against those stouthearted men and women in blue. They were merely doing what they were ordered, we are sure, and with the proper admonition to 'be careful out there', if a harkening back to a well known catchphrase from a well received police show of thirty some years ago may suit our purpose here. If the reference escapes you, this is where it may be found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2QApwtE8zQ . It was surely an easy if boring night of work for them, the 5 or 6 squad cars of dutiful civil servants we could count for ourselves who were assigned such a menial task. Surely they pined for a career out of the police academy which offered a greater challenge than signalling an errant driver to the roadside, for no greater sin than a citizen driving his own car on a highway paid for by his taxes having no real concern for his own safety or that of his fellows. Surely the murderer, the rapist, the arsonist, the robber; nay, even the passer of bad checks, could not have been doing more harm to society last evening than that inconsiderate unbuckled operator of a motor vehicle. The nerve. Cheek, gall; that's what it is.

And now, as we have assuaged the desire to over-employ the semicolon as we pen our message this noonday, we leave you with this heartfelt thought.

Seat belt check are a waste of time and manpower. It seems that the nanny state rules, especially as it easier to apprehend safe criminals over unsafe. Our leaders appear to do so much while doing so little as they assign their minions such tasks so well below their training. Yet so little done seems the fate of modern government at all levels these days.