When Turley wrote about Walmart being at the core of yet another call to the cops to protect society from parents photographing their children in the bath tub, he noted that Walmart is a never ending source of incredibly stupid acts.
What makes this lawsuit so interesting is the inclusion of Walmart as a party. I am not sure what this blog would do without Walmart. When Walmart is not destroying Civil War historical areas, it is supplying blogs with a steady supply of abusive corporate conduct here and here and here), crimes committed by employees (here and here and here), or crimes by customers (here and here and here and here and here).It’s one thing that someone at Walmart, renown for its film developing, joined the cadre of those on the lookout for those sex offenders formerly called normal parents (or grandparents), but there’s no apparent end to the wrongs that Walmart is integral in righting. Why is that?
Some might say that it has much to do with the sensibilities of your typical Walmart employee. Neither pretentious nor flashy, these are the salt of the earth. Regular folk with solid American values. Hard working, moral and filled with common sense. Just like the patrons of Walmart, thrifty and unwilling to throw their hard-earned money away on frivolities.
There are a million voices on the internets and elsewhere lauding these regular folk and their values. They cry, “what happened to common sense?” Guess what? This is common sense. Just not your common sense, but it’s about as common as it gets.
There’s a pretense we all hold that we are the norm, that whatever thoughts flow through our heads are the ones shared by ordinary, rational people of good will and intention. We believe in our own thoughts, and we believe that most people, the normal ones, share them. We are deluding ourselves.
As rational as we wish to believe ourselves to be, the same is true of most everyone else. Except we all disagree. Every single one of us. We may share a few thoughts, overlap from time to time, but we also harbor thoughts that others believe to be absurdly wrong. Maybe even dangerous. Except we don’t know it and refuse to acknowledge it.
Walmart is likely an excellent microcosm of America, and that’s why Walmart employees, Walmart management and Walmart shoppers provide this seemingly endless stream of stupid acts. We are all Walmart greeters, no matter how much we think otherwise.
Common sense is alive and well. And it’s on sale at Walmart.
Low prices, always. Literally and figuratively.
Insane registry laws and restrictions did not prevent the perverts, Philip Garrido AND HIS WIFE from doing what they did! The registry laws, and especially the residency / work place restrictions, have done far more harm than good. Forget about all the cases of vigilantism and suicide; forget about the fact that while these laws are proposed to protect the children, they include children, while a huge percentage of those on the list committed crimes that had nothing to do with children; forget about the fact that study after study has proven these laws not only are ineffective, but have actually made matters worse. Forget about the fact that upon release from custody, sex offenders have one of the lowest recidivism rates, not the highest. In fact those who receive counseling and treatment have outstanding records versus those convicted of other violent crimes! The fact is the registry and any restrictions should be limited to those who are proven child molesters and pedophiles; that Law Enforcement could handle and monitor effectively. Do you seriously believe a committed pedophile cannot walk or drive 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 feet or more? Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted miles from where Philip Garrido lived!
I am sure we will see comments from hysterical, uninformed individual(s) who will suggest that all those on the registry should be locked up for life or worse and say there is no rehabilitation for these people. And for a few they are right, we need to focus on those! Once a person has done their time that should be it. That is the foundation of this great country and its legal system. Don’t like it, move to China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or wherever individual rights are ignored. If a person is a pedophile, lock them up for a long time and provide treatment. Treatment not working, keep them locked up. Many families are being destroyed for political expediency; children of those on the registry are being abused and ostracized at school. Whole families are forced into isolation and restricted from the work place. If the registry is to truly protect the children, then let’s focus on the pedophiles and child molesters’. Get rid of the residency/work place restrictions, focus on the loitering laws. Let the rest on the registry re-assimilate into society after they have done their time, become solid, productive citizens; part of the solution not the problem. The facts, (and the Garrido case) as well as virtually all of the research, and study after study have proven what we are doing now, mostly for political expediency and to appease hysterical uninformed parents is not working and is in fact making matters worse!
With regard too the Sexual Offender Registration laws, the public dissemination of public information in such a way as to guarantee public humiliation, loss of privacy, reckless endangerment and threat of harm (even extinction), risk & humiliation of innocent family members and fellow employees, destruction of innocent children’s lives, has been ruled permissible by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)… However, the raping of individuals rights to residency, protection from banishment, right to affordable housing, restrictions on gainful employment, restraints against freedom of movement and lawful assembly, destruction of ability to assimilate into society, restrictions from access to public services and facilities, and general banishment from society, even retroactively after conviction and/or after a person has served their sentence, has yet to be ruled on. Please ACLU and others, please give the SCOTUS the opportunity to unconstitutionally screw up that ruling too.
In August of 2009 it was clearly seen how irrational lawmakers can be. Pretending to speak truth for the people yet speaking hate and confusion through the same mouth they use to hold themselves as leaders.
Only a fool makes an argument over what is rational and what is not, for everyone who has not lost their sense of right and wrong already knows what is reasonable because all humans are born with a basic Bios’ system that helps us distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, but many chose to corrupt that Bios’ to hold onto beliefs that do go contrary to not only so called common sense, but also good sense.
When zealots persuade others that sex offender means a person who is despicable, that sense of common sense is lost because the zealot regardless of education sees through a corrupted Bios’ and belief system that all who are forced to suffer the indignity of the label sex offender are all child molesters, pedophiles, rapists, and sexual predators, then they identity themselves as irrational although believing they are rational to take away the lives, liberties, and opportunities for redemption of others. Substituting blind hate and an intolerant belief system that guarantees their hatred will ruin the lives of others whether those lives deserve to be ruined or not. They don’t care.
Lack of heart and a willingness to develop knowledge, understanding, and wisdom these zealots rely on misinformation, disinformation, and omission of information to achieve the deception they need to further their way of thinking to the detriment of others no matter whether the others be child, young adult, or adult.
Zealots of hate and fear are ruinous, and like blood sucking leaches they try to draw out of people any sense of fairness, less the wrath of the zealot be felt upon them. This develops into a common sense that is irrational, hateful, and fearful. It is against these individuals whether common man or political leader that we fight as advocates of fairness in the laws, hoping that as we fight we can chip away at these barriers of irrational thought, hate, and fear. Without advocates for fairness in the laws, there would be no balancing of law with justice, because as you see, true justice is not blind, and neither would be the making of laws to punish the wrong doer.
I find your post incomprehensible. I worked at Wal-Mart briefly, and live among the everyday people who supposedly commit “stupid acts.” I trust them much more than I trust many more highly educated people. They are guileless, which is a valuable trait. If one of them became excessively worried about pictures of naked children, it may help to remember that Wal-Mart has more than 1 million employees. With a pool that large, you can’t fail to find someone doing something that seems foolish.
This is going to be sent to my clients on a regular basis. They all presume that because they are Free Speech loving Americans, mostly either educated formally, or the kind of people who spent years getting a Good Will Hunting education, they presume that “common sense” will dictate.
And then I explain to them that “common” is the sense that makes the octomom famous, Glenn Beck rich, and “dancing with the stars” a smash sensation, while their beloved NPR and PBS struggle to survive.