Being out of the news loop

So, basically the last four days have been dedicated to family, and the weather was terrific and I paid zero attention to the news.

I highly recommend taking a few days off from news. It’s good for the heart.

However, I am a little behind on email and must do some catching up before I have anything worthwhile to post.

I will leave you this little bit, though: At one point, my husband and I were strolling through the city and realized we were going to be late for a gathering, so we hopped in a cab and had a very interesting chat with the driver, an Afghani (is that correct?) who has lived here for 30 years, raised a family and so forth. In talking about the advantages of working for oneself, he said he had not yet felt the pinch of the bad economy, but he expected he would, sooner or later. Then he complained that America was “no longer a democracy.”

I asked him what he meant by that and he said, “this country used to be about freedom. You work, you pay your taxes, and you are left alone to live your life. That was freedom. Now America is all about little laws, I am being nagged to death with the little laws. I work on cars like a hobby. I always keep my cab covered, out of regard for my neighbors. Then I am told, ‘you’re not allowed to cover your car’, I think because they wonder what is under it. So I don’t cover it, and then I get told it must come off the street because it is an eyesore, but I am not allowed to cover it.”

“Yeah, those little laws,” I teased, “Chesterton said, ‘When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom. You do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.’ ”

“But I am not breaking any laws!” he said, “I do nothing but work and work and I work very hard, and I feel like every day America is finding new laws, more laws, and no matter how much I want to just live my life and keep to myself, America is making so many laws that we all cannot just live anymore, now we have to always answer to someone. I don’t like it.”

“No, I can’t say I like it much, either,” I agreed.

My husband, who dislikes talking politics and would rather talk ‘people’ asked him about his children and whether they had visited Afghanistan. They had not but, “Afghanistan is not what you see on the news; it is not just a hellhole of warriors and opium. The news does not tell you anything real anymore, not about anything. What is happening in America I never thought I’d would see. Everything is changing.”

“But change is what people voted for,” my husband said.

The driver merely waved that sentiment on with a dismissive hand.

We tipped him well and I paused to jot a few notes about the driver and our conversation. “Why didn’t you do that in the car,” my annoyed husband asked.

“Honey, if I had taken notes while he was talking, he probably would have thought I was undercover with the FBI!”

My husband chuckled and allowed that he might have, at that. But I think our Afghan friend was on to something. All the little, nagging laws come about in inches, and small increments. But they grow larger and more numerous all the time – until we are suddenly less free.

Immigrants who have come to America for freedom are very likely the first ones to be sensitive to any erosion of that freedom. Something to think about.