The fourth of July brings to Connecticut police reminders that all fireworks are illegal, even the ones you just bought in Connecticut. \u00a0I shouldn’t name names, but big stores in my town sell lots of fireworks that the police say are illegal to set off in Connecticut.<\/p>\n

Most of us don’t think this is strange, but I do, I think we have a strange system that allows us to do just about anything, but the police say we can’t do that thing. \u00a0And they call this a free country.<\/p>\n

My town has a two lane divided highway running through it and at any given moment every single car on it is driving faster than the speed limit unless they are slowing down to take an exit. \u00a0This is normal in the United States.<\/p>\n

Nearly twice as much money is spent on illegal recreational drugs in the US than on legal alcohol. \u00a0This is normal. \u00a0None of us question this, and most of us defend the idea that those in prison are just the unlucky ones who got caught, that all of us do things that are illegal.<\/p>\n

If questioned about the illegal things we do, well, those things are so bad as the illegal things others do. \u00a0This is normal in the United States. \u00a0The ones who are in prison must have done something much worse than the things we did, but we don’t have any evidence of this. \u00a0Or the evidence is that they are in prison and we aren’t.<\/p>\n

Nearly 80% of our state budget in Connecticut is related to payroll and benefits for state employees. \u00a0And nearly 80% of all the state employees are related to public safety, law enforcement, prisons, judicial, law making and such.<\/p>\n

Imagine how much money we could save and how much better our surroundings if we educated people on the dangers of addiction instead of punishing them for drug use, \u00a0Or if our laws were structured for unsafe driving at the discretion of the officer instead of picking a speed and saying that in this area this is the maximum, in this area the maximum is different and so on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fourth of July brings to Connecticut police reminders that all fireworks are illegal, even the ones you just bought in Connecticut. \u00a0I shouldn’t name names, but big stores in my town sell lots of fireworks that the police say are illegal to set off in Connecticut. Most of us don’t think this is strange, … Continue reading Illegal? Isn’t Everything Illegal?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8FSV9-6V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simplifyandrepeal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}