Justice Gone A-duck

Every now and again incidents take place that leave one wondering if some of our officials, local and otherwise, have been sniffing duck droppings. The display of their lack of judgment can be astounding to say the least.

On a particular talk show, a lady was telling about how she caught her next door neighbors video taping her lounging around the house in her lingerie. Her neighbors went as far as poisoning and killing their own bushes to provide these pervs with a less obstructed view of her.

The lounging lady called the police and, to make a long story short (in other words I’m not sure how it happened), the cops got hold of the neighbor’s tape and, now comes the absurd part, arrested the lounging lady for lewd conduct.

Arrested for lewd conduct?! The worse thing this lady was guilty of was not closing her blinds while strolling around her home in her underwear. I mean, how lewd could that have been?

Several times the talk show she was on played her neighbors video, and I got to tell you I’ve turned off a lot worse things on my television than what I saw on that video; yet, she was arrested for lewd and obscene conduct. Give me a break!

And what happened to the voyeuristic neighbors? As far as I know, nothing.

Oh, and for the state where this little incident happened, I have some suggestions for a new state motto. Yeah, like the sign announcing you’ve just crossed the state line could read: Welcome to Blah, Blah, Blah, The Wrong Is Right and Right Is Wrong State.

Another incident that has caused many people to question the competence of our officials took place in a high school in one of our fair Midwestern states.

It seems two students were suspended from this particular school, which is nothing unusual by itself. But from the details of the story it becomes obvious that this is another example of authority gone haywire. This is what happened as I understand it.

One of the two boys was feeling ill at school. So, the other offered the sick kid an anti-depressant. How an anti-depressant was supposed to help the sick kid feel better, I don’t know.

Anyway, the ill boy didn’t swallow the pill. Instead he took it home and showed to his mother. Mom, of course, pitched a fit and called the school. What happened next defies logic.

Both boys were suspended from school. That’s right. Even the boy who rightfully turned the evidence (the pill) over to his mother was suspended from school because he accepted the anti-depressant from the other boy.

The bright side (if there is one) to this is the kid who accepted the pill ought to be glad the other boy didn’t give him something even more serious . . . like some devious plot to harm others. Who knows what would have happened to the boy for turning that over to the authorities?

Finally, when speaking of officials not using good judgment, I offer you what happened in Branson, Missouri when I lived there.

The Army Corp. of Engineers decided that when Table Rock Damn was built some thirty years earlier by the Corp., it was built ten feet too short. According to them, if that area was to have the type of flooding the Mississippi had in the early 1990s, the water would be too much for the damn and it wouldn’t hold.

This damn, ladies and gentlemen, is not a small earthen damn. It’s big enough to have created hundreds upon hundreds of miles of shoreline that make up Table Rock Lake. Heck, tours are conducted inside the damn—those would be damn tours by the way, given by a damn tour guide.

Don’t you have to wonder how this little oversight was brought to light? Thirty years after the damn was built, did one of the engineers suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and, in a cold sweat, say in horror, “Oh, oh!”

And there are people who want this same government to run a national healthcare system. Yeah, right.

Imagine getting a call thirty years after receiving stomach surgery and being told, “uh, we’d like you to come in for some x-rays. We lost an instrument during your surgery and the presiding surgeon just remembered where it might have gone.”

Struggle as we might to understand, it’s sometimes hard to figure out the judgment, or lack thereof, shown by some of our officials. Until we do, sniff a duck dropping or two. Who knows? It might help to cope with the chaos.