Since when does safety harm freedom?

It was a good week, and a bad one, for the concept of common sense in Chicago when it comes to the balance between public safety and public freedom.

On the one hand, a U.S. District judge for northern Illinois upheld the concept that the city’s ban on people using cellular telephones while driving their cars ought to be illegal.

BUT WE IN Chicago also had to put up with the Libertarian nitwits of “Reason” magazine, which conducted a study that claims Chicago to be the “most restrictive” city in the United States. And one of the examples they give of Chicago being overbearing towards its residents is that it would dare to suggest that people who talk on their hand-held cell phones while driving a car are knuckleheads.

I get easily irritated whenever people try to make the accusation that the freedom of U.S. residents is threatened because of laws meant to protect the public safety. It’s as though they have never heard that old cliché “your right to swing your arms about ends at the tip of my nose.”

Or perhaps these are just the grade-school bullies of old, now all grown up and being offended that they are no longer being allowed to terrorize other people with their behavior – as though their “freedom” (I would call it recklessness) must be imposed on other people.

That honestly is how I always perceived the notion of banning cell phone use while driving a car.

PERHAPS I AM just sensitized to the issue now because I spent a four-hour period of time this week in traffic safety school (working off a conviction for a speeding ticket received earlier this year in unincorporated southern Cook County).

I got to see examples of people insisting on using their telephones and trying to conduct some sort of all-important (to them, at least) business. The end result was that they were not paying full attention, and while many were able to avert accidents, they were still engaged in near-hits.

Why should we, the people of Chicago (and those who happen to be passing through our wonderful city) have to be subjected to the half-attention of motorists, just because some knucklehead thinks his or her personal conversation is so important that we have to pay extra attention to their vehicle so as to avoid having it hit us.

It was good to read Judge Ruben Castillo refer to Chicago’s ban, which has been in effect for nearly three years, as “rational.”

AND IT WAS good to see the knuckleheads who think their phone call home to make sure the spouse picked up their dry cleaning is so important are actually a threat to, “the safety of the people on the city’s streets.”

Now I know the attorney who was leading the effort behind this lawsuit claimed he was offended at the way the city allegedly did not inform people in Chicago of the fact that the cell phone ban was now a law.

He claims he would have had no problem had signs posted all over the city made it clear what the law was. I’m skeptical.

That reasoning sounds like a legalese attempt to find any reason that an ideologically inspired judge (and let’s be honest, “judicial activism” these days is practiced mostly by conservative judges) could use to strike down the law.

THAT WOULD ALLOW the knuckleheads to make ridiculous claims that their “freedom” was restored, while also allowing the attorney to earn a significant legal fee for his efforts. In short, it is ridiculous, as was the argument made by “Reason” magazine that freedom in Chicago is impaired because we only have about 1,300 taverns in the city, compared to about 7,000 that existed during and just after the Second World War.

What the magazine, in a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune in defense of their study, describes as “suffocating paternalism” is merely the attempt to balance out the individual rights of all residents of a society. It is what living in civilization is all about.

For those who want to go off and live in a cave somewhere where they can be the supreme ruler over their personal domain, I suppose that’s their personal choice. But just because one thinks the Unabomber’s pre-incarceration lifestyle is the ideal does not mean they have the right to drag the rest of us into it.

So the notion that there is something “wrong” and un-Democratic about bans on tobacco smoking in public places is absurd. So were the magazine’s complaints about the number of traffic signals with special cameras attached to catch motorists whose violations might otherwise go undetected.

WHAT I FOUND particularly ridiculous was the notion of the magazine’s “free-est’ city – Las Vegas, Nev.

The overgrown Nevada town in the middle of the desert may be a nice place to visit (if losing all your money to slot machines and other games of chance is your idea of a perfect vacation) for a few days.

But Las Vegas with its excess of gambling and local economy that consists of few jobs that aren’t of the menial sort of work provided by casinos is hardly the ideal place where anyone would live, unless you happened to be born and raised there and have few opportunities to set up a life elsewhere.

WHILE I REALIZE the days of old when the casinos of Las Vegas were run by the criminal elements of Chicago are gone, one can make an argument that its lack of regulation today makes it hardly the place to want to be.

The ideologues who compiled the study for “Reason” may view Chicago regulation as “treating its citizens like children,” but I would argue that Las Vegas lack of regulation is more like letting the bratty children run amok and cause problems for everybody else.

If Chicago is an overbearing parent, does that make Las Vegas the equivalent of a bad mom who gets investigated by the Department of Children and Family Services for child neglect?

SO ON THIS day when we reflect on our nation’s independence (and all the high-minded ideals of freedom and Democracy that we’d like to think the United States stands for), we need to think seriously about what we really want the definition of “freedom” to be.

Do we really want to think of the oaf who insists on blowing his tobacco smoke on others in a restaurant, using his cell phone to order a pizza to be delivered to his house while he is still en route home from work and bellowing that those cameras installed on traffic signals to catch traffic violations are spying on him when they catch him ignoring a "red" light, as being the ideal that those “patriots” fought and died for when they sought the concept of an independent American nation more than two centuries ago.

Or is he just a blowhard who is best ignored?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: There won’t be any refunds anytime soon of (http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/07/03/Judge_dismisses_cell_phone_lawsuit/UPI-10731215100742/) all the monies collected by Chicago in fines for violations of the city ordinances against cellular telephone use while driving a car.

What "Reason" magazine thinks of as Chicago turned sissified may (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-chicago-sin-perspective,0,1437711.story) very well be an outburst of common sense.

I hardly view the rural Illinois officials who are refusing to enforce a statewide ban on smoking in public places as standing up for (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-downstate-smokingjun30,0,2717342.story) freedom.” I’m not alone in thinking (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-080703smoke_briefs,0,3949801.story) this way.