Everything in Life is Now a Crime
I walked down Rouse to a local Wendy's, located on the corner of Rouse and University, where I ate my monthly #7. Large. It used to be #6 on the menu. It's turning hot in Orlando, so I broke out in a small sweat just walking around in the bright sunshine. Nothing horrendous, but a reminder of the coming summer heat and humidity.
On the way back I passed several of these signs sitting between the sidewalk and the retention pond, the retention pond that sits between Rouse and the backside of the office complex where my office is located. What's so important that someone felt compelled to put up no-trespassing signs in the middle of open area between the public sidewalk and the retention pond? Is is valuable? No, not really. Is it fenced in? Not at all. On a bright sunny day, what's wrong with slowly walking down by the water where the ducks like to swim and enjoying weather?
Not a damn thing, really. Some officious asshole, in local county government or perhaps some absentee owner of that little bit of real estate, decided to put up those signs to keep the riff-raff away. Riff-raff like me, who work next to it in those office buildings that sit next to it on the other side. You can't trust engineers, they ask to many questions and they're too clever by half.
And it's the kind of pointless posturing posting that police will use against you if they just happen to come by and decide, for whatever reason, they don't like you and need any flimsy excuse to arrest you. The same police who turned a blind eye to the killer of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, the same police who run speed traps a block up on Corporate, the same police who pulled me over in my neighborhood because I took a photo of one of them sitting in an unmarked car for no good reason. The same kind of police who brutalized all those Occupy protesters all last year from New York to Washington to Oakland and points in between. The over militarized police who have slowly become as much the enemy as the "enemies" they say they're trying to protect us all from.
Technical
Photographs taken with the Olympus E-P2 and M.Zuiko 45mm. Post processed like crazy in Lightroom 4.
What's amazing to me is how often one sees these sorts of signs, rules and regulations out in the middle of no where, where there isn't even anyone around to enforce their observance, let alone an urban center like Orlando.
ReplyDeleteAs for #OWS, the protestors, who so badly wanted to slap a bunch of regulations and oversite on bankers to curb their evil and unruly behavior, were they practicing what they preached?
No, of course not. They could not even abide by the simple regulation that most cities and towns have concerning their public parks: you cannot sleep overnight (camp) in one. Even the homeless know this, and most of them will avoid public parks for that very reason. Most of them sleep on private property. Shhhh...don't tell anyone.
As for the media circus that is the Travon Martin killing, a few points of fact are in order...
1. George Zimmerman called 911 and requested the police come and check out the activities of a suspicious young man in his neighborhood. Since George is a self-confessed Neighborhood Watch volunteer in the crime infested swamp of Sanford, that's just what they are suppose to do.
2. When the police arrived on seen, and saw George standing over Travon, he told them straight-up that he had shot him, after Travon had attacked him. He surrendered his gun and cooperated fully and completely with the police.
Now, how many murderers do you know of, that call the police right before they murder someone, giving them the address where it's going to take place, and then, after committing the murder, hang out waiting for the police to arrive, immediately confess to the murder, and then fully cooperate with the police after the fact?
I don't know of a single instance of this either.
You can call Zimmerman a murderer if you want, but all the available evidence and officially released documents supports his claim that he killed Travon in self-defense. If you have any evidence to the contrary, feel free to share it with the rest of us. I'll gladly stand on my roof an denounce George Zimmerman as murderer and racist if there is any sort of documented evidence that backs that up. I've looked, and all I've seen are lots of allegations that have no basis in fact. Not only that, but every allegation that has been leveled so far has already been refuted byt the simple facts already published.
Getting crowds riled up and denouncing a person is not evidence of anything. Just look what happened to Jesus one Good Friday a little over 2,000 years ago.