On banning the Big Gulp

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this-sign-has-sharp-edgesSo there was a huge furor over whether or not you can legally purchase a Big Gulp in New York City recently. The Mayor (who doesn’t like guns, and therefore cannot be trusted anyway) actually tried to pass a law saying giant sodie pops were dangerous to your health and should not be made available to the general public in easily accessible portals, such as cups. I have it on good authority he’s also proposed rationing chocolate chips, because we simply cannot be trusted with sugary goodness on our own.

He was defeated, of course, by a judge who realized how incredibly stupid the entire episode was. When we involve words like defeated and judge it represents the sorry fact that important things like actual time and money were spent on this endeavor. As a matter of fact, the Mayor has hired lawyers to continue the “good fight” against evil fizzy drinks. Because, you know, that’s important. We need to spend millions of dollars banning a cup size when kids are going hungry. Because that makes complete and total sense.

If the Mayor is concerned about public health, he should ban all automatic air fresheners. You know these horrible things — they blast flowery chemicals directly into one or both of your eyeballs every single time you walk by. Public restrooms employ them a lot; it’s a tactic used to get you in and out quickly. An evil little machine spritzes out lavender-scented eye napalm and it always seems to be set for exactly the moment you happen to look up and notice the air freshener. Not only are they installed at right-above-eyeball height, they’re in decorative canisters that draw your eye to them, so maximum surface coverage of the sclera is achieved and your eyeballs can be fresh as summer rain (after they stop bleeding).

Here’s another idea. Why don’t we just ban people who refuse to teach their children common sense? We could completely eradicate about half the bans on things we’ve banned if we just taught our kids to use their head for something other than a phone stand. Seriously, all this business about giving three-year-old kids a choice about behavior is nonsense. Tell your kids what to do and how to do it. For God’s sake, do you really want a three-year-old in charge? And when they do something stupid, tell them it’s stupid and why it’s stupid. That’s your job.

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My parents didn’t have any problem telling us no and giving us horrifying examples of why we shouldn’t do things. No one had to ban large sodas, because if we asked for one my Mother always said no and when we persisted she told us drinking large sodas would rot our insides and our teeth would fall out and no one would like us and we’d die alone and toothless. And that was that. She never caved, we never drank large sodas and all of us are still alive, have friends and are not toothless. Yay Mom.

There’s this thing called natural selection our society has brought to a standstill, and we’ve done ourselves no favors in doing so. If someone is too idiotic to keep themselves from drinking Drano and playing with matches around gasoline, then maybe we don’t need that person around, polluting the gene pool. Don’t ban the Drano and matches, ban the idiot.

In the immortal words of my Granny Benton, “If he’s too dang dumb to come in, leave him out.”

Indeed, Granny, indeed.

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