Three Things I Need To Bag And Toss

The other day I ran across this interesting picture while surfing the net for visual content. While its creator was using it to make a humorous statement about the crap that comes out of Government Agencies and major Media Networks, I thought it might serve a more practical purpose here. So, for the next few hundred words, I’m going to consider it a symbolic way to dispose of some of the most irritating, nonpolitical subjects that have been bugging me lately.

Of course, if I listed everything that chafes my derriere on a daily basis, I’d need to definitely replace the symbolic bag, with a symbolic dumpster. But for now, I’ve randomly picked only three of the smaller irritants I'd like to see go. The rest can wait for another time.

First to be tossed, is the fact I have to pay the same price for a pair of pants as a guy who shops for clothes in the “Big and Tall Man‘s” section. I mean, give me a break. You could make two pair of my sized pants, out of the cloth it takes to make just one of his. Why, then, am I paying 100% more? Because I can’t afford to get arrested walking around naked from the waist down, that’s why.

And another thing. I can’t even buy pants “off the rack” like he can, that fit me without a need for additional shortening. So there goes another few inches of cloth into the trash, which adds gross insult to financial injury. You know? I think there might be a successful A.C.L.U. discrimination lawsuit here.

The second thing into the BS bag, are those paper-thin plastic bottles that drinking water comes in these days. Some environmentally conscious bureaucrat decided it would be more “green” to make them as thin as humanly possible. After all, it takes a plastic bottle one hundred years to biodegrade, so a thinner version may reduce that time to who knows … maybe ninety years?

But a thinner bottle means that when you open one, too much hand pressure makes the water shoot up your nose like a geyser. I mean, it’s like a bidet for your face. So, if time in the landfill is what prompted thinning the latest version of our plastic bottles, I’d suggest they start selling drinking water in tin cans. At least they don’t crush under hand pressure, and take only fifty years to biodegrade.

Third, and last for today, is the high tech, high altitude spying that’s going on in the skies over my neighborhood. I mean, is there no such thing as privacy anymore? Isn’t it unAmerican for a person not to be able to garden in the nude within the walled confines of his own yard, that is, without someone spying on him from a couple thousand feet?

I know why my city subscribes to satellite surveillance services. They want to stay on top of things like whether I’m raising mosquitoes in my swimming pool, or adding structures to my property without taking out a city permit. Besides that, they also want visual reassurance that those tomato bushes I've planted along the backyard wall, are not really marijuana plants in drag. I mean, the next thing they’ll want to know is if I’m smoking my oregano plants.

In the end, then, I think surveillance from the air must, in some way, tromp on the “search” provisions of the Fourth Amendment. I mean, if a two thousand foot tall officer can’t search you home without probable cause, why should a two thousand foot high satellite get away with it?