IS THIS STILL AMERICA?

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve heard of a lot of things that sound very un-American. Take for instance the fact that little children are not allowed to sell lemonade from a stand in their own yard without a permit—-which takes months to obtain after taking a food safety course and passing a test connected with it.

A person may now be arrested for selling a chicken, pig, or part of a beef cow one has butchered; if you want to stay on the right side of  the law you better think twice before selling those extra eggs, they haven’t been inspected by the government; and don’t even contemplate selling any of that excess raw milk you may be fortunate enough to have.. even health food stores can’t sell raw milk because it’s now considered too dangerous for human consumption! Wow, we had no idea we were breaking the law when we sold our excess milk to our neighbors…lucky for us the authorities didn’t find out.

The time-honored tradition of Girl Scouts going door to door to sell their cookies has also been abolished. They cannot gather in a group and sell to passers by or even sell from their own yard; they don’t have a permit you see which takes….yada, yada, yada…

And be careful which piece of land you buy to build on; you may get started building your dream home only to be stopped from building because of new building codes, or because a rare bird was seen in the area, or because the surrounding land has just been declared a wetland, or for any number of other reasons. You can protest all you want but no one can compete with government agencies so don’t even try.

Thinking of having a yard sale [tag sale, garage sale] this weekend? Better check the CPSC [Consumer Protection Safety Commission] handbook. Technically you can be on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of fines if you sell anything that has been recalled or that will be recalled in the future. Are you selling anything with metal, paint or plastic? any old clothes or shoes with metal components that a child may come in contact with? Better not, that’s a no no under the new consumer guidelines. The way we are now taught to be suspicious of each other and inform on our neighbors we may be subject to a hefty fine just for selling those things we can no longer use. So far no one has been hauled to jail or fined but it is just a matter of time before this happens. In many states one must now obtain and sign a yard sale application prior to actually having a yard sale and in those states there are strict rules governing the use of signs for said sale.

These laws [and many more we aren’t even aware of] are firmly in place all across the nation. If they aren’t being enforced in your area don’t breathe too easily just yet. Some fine morning you may wake up to discover yourself a criminal, ensnared by a ridiculous set of laws you didn’t even know existed and which until that time had not been enforced. There are so many new laws passed daily there is no way we can know about them much less live them. Let’s hope we don’t run afoul of the law simply by innocently living our lives.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are quickly losing our freedoms. It’s sad to see all these changes…this is not the America in which I grew up. I never thought I’d have to say, this is not East Germany or Soviet Russia….this is America, land of the free, home of the brave—-or is it?