Are laws contradictory to technology?

Gov. Pat Quinn signed a couple of bills into law on Thursday meant to crack down on people who are so absorbed about themselves that they can’t bear to be away from their cellular telephones, Blackberrys, or the Internet.

Basically put, police are now going to have the authority to issue a lot more tickets to people who insist on talking on their cellphones while driving through a construction zone, or insist on sending text messages or using their tiny devices to check the Internet while also driving a car.

NOW I’M NOT about to argue that those people who would be talking on the phone while they should be paying attention to the road to ensure they don’t hit a construction worker aren’t knuckleheads.

They are.

But should it really be a surprise that some people think it is their right to whip out that cellphone and talk to whomever they want whenever they want? Personally, I have a niece who once berated me for not answering my cellphone when she called me.

She is 6. But she and her brothers are growing up in a world where it seems alien to them not to be able to reach someone at the exact moment they want, regardless of where people are.

SO TO WHAT degree are these new laws that Quinn approved during ceremonies at Northeastern Illinois University contradictory to the public mood?

In fact, the whole point of modern technology often is to make people accessible anywhere, and to make it possible for them to set their own environments so they can ignore their surroundings.

It would seem that these new laws could be seen as the desperate attempt of old fogies to impose some old way of thinking of things on the modern life they want technology to create.

I’m not defending these people. Because at heart, I’m an old fart and I take some pride in it.

I THINK A significant problem in our society today is that we have too many people who are wrapped up in themselves to the point that they can’t break away from whatever kind of device they carry.

It is almost like they are not alive when they are not hooked in to their particular device. At the very least, the moment when they have to shut down is the end of the day for them, rather than the moment when real life can begin.

I think that is sad. But I’m sure they’re about to respond that I need to get real, and that it is no more difficult to talk on a cellphone while driving than it is to listen to the radio. Of course, it would have to be Sirius satellite radio, since only old farts listen to “terrestrial” radio broadcasts.

At least that’s what my brother (who has a subscription so he can listen to Howard Stern and to Steven Van Zandt’s “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” music program) tells me.

PERSONALLY, I WAS kind of shocked to learn of the General Assembly’s actions this spring that passed these two bills that Quinn signed into law. I would have thought it already would have been illegal in Illinois to do the things that the new laws say are now illegal.

Seriously, what kind of gibberish-inspired message is all that important that it must be sent from a moving vehicle?

And in the cases where there is a legitimate emergency, it really is all too easy to pull over to the side of the road.

I recently had such an incident where a telephone call I placed to a government official for an interview was returned while I was driving on an Interstate highway. I pulled over to the side of the road for about 10 minutes – which is what it took to conduct that particular interview.

I WASN’T FOOLISH enough to try to ask questions, take notes and drive an automobile simultaneously. I know I would have wound up becoming a three-graf news brief about an auto fatality on the Interstate had I tried.

So I can appreciate the modern-day convenience of a cellphone in that it allowed me to leave the “office” to take care of other business without missing calls.

But I have come to accept the fact that there is a whole new generation developing that isn’t the least bit like me – who only got around to starting to use a cellphone about two years ago and is writing this particular commentary on a laptop computer I have owned for nearly seven years. They are going to complain about Quinn’s actions today for some time.

While I appreciate how much writing and editing has been made easier by computers (my earliest published work was written on Smith/Corona, and occasionally I still dig out a typewriter to create a rough draft), I’m not addicted to these devices.

I CAN HONESTLY say that one of the high points of my day every day is the moment when I am finished using my laptop computer (to write, send and receive e-mail and access various sites on the Internet) and can shut it down.

Because that means my “life” for the day can finally begin.

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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.