Lazarus Austin is a junior majoring in history. He can be contacted at [email protected].Day after day, our country is reminding me more and more of the Big Brother in “1984.” New policies continue to restrict the American people, free enterprise and independent behavior.
The smoking ban, the Fairness Doctrine, fast-food policies, equal opportunity and social indoctrination are all programs that contribute to such a decline in our society.
Our country faces many problems – obesity, lung cancer, racial and sexual discrimination, declining family values, the works – and federal and local governments are all too happy to help. Actually, let me rephrase that: Big Brother is all too happy to help.
Do not get me wrong, the government cannot just ignore the problems; there is just an increasing trend of trigger-happy responses to these problems.
Local smoking bans, for example, are popping up all over the country, including right here in Starkville. Obviously, people are rightfully concerned about secondhand smoke. People are also wrongfully concerned about other peoples’ welfare.
As a result, smoking has been banned from most public places, including many college campuses. When I was working as an officer for Phi Theta Kappa at Hinds Community College, my local chapter attempted to have smoking completely banned from campus. They cited littering and secondhand smoke as a problem. However, when I asked why we have to prohibit it all over campus, they said that people should not be smoking anyway.
At Hinds Community College, Starkville and many cities, lawmakers are influenced by a desire to change people for their own good.
Additionally, lawmakers are concerned about the impact fast food is having on our obesity rates. This has led many of them to pass legislation concerning fast-food content and information. In California, Gov. Schwarzenagger just vetoed a bill that would have required fast-food restaurants to post health information on their menus.
Such a bill, in my opinion, would have been impractical. As a norm, most of them already post their health information on separate, conveniently found menus.
In another case, the “powers that be” want to censor what people say on the radio and on television in a policy I like to call “the Unfair Doctrine.” They think that some media outlets are too heavily influenced by one side of the political spectrum or the other. They want to balance political airtime “for the people’s benefit.”
In addition to airtime, lawmakers want to “balance” opportunities. They call it “equal opportunity,” but they end up giving more opportunities to the minority. Professorships at universities are one example. Schools are more interested in hiring minority and foreign teachers than they are teachers with the right credentials and skills. Similarly, the same thing happens with students.
Big Brother is no more apparent than it is in the many new social indoctrination policies that have been popping up everywhere. To use California as an example again, legislation was recently passed to ban the words “mother” and “father” from their textbooks and from their teachers’ mouths. Their logic was that using the words “mother” and “father” establishes heterosexuality as a social norm, and they do not want to indoctrinate students. In many cities and states, schools are teaching kids about homosexuality at a very early age, in effect indoctrinating them that it is OK and a social norm.
Unfortunately, the list does not stop there. There are many examples of smaller, ostensibly trivial laws that demonstrate their eagerness to exert their authority. Traffic laws, gun control, the Patriot Act and censorship (e.g. the Danish newspaper cartoons of Muhammad) are just a few examples of increasing applications of authority.
I am seeing an alarming trend towards authoritarian abuse of power on a national level. The government has a responsibility to reasonably serve the people, but that is not what is happening. In many cases, they are going too far and doing too much.
As voters, and particularly as college students who are the future of our United States, we need to be aware of any infringements on our personal liberties and on any excess government action.