Big Brother is Watching: Click it or Ticket

The weather is heating up, and summer time will begin unofficially this Monday with Memorial Day festivities. For me, Memorial Day is time in Ocean City with my family, and the first full weekend to jump on my grandfather's wave-runner.

It is also time for gridlock traffic on the Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway, which turns an hour drive into a three hour marathon.

Memorial Day Weekend is one of the highest traveled weekends of the year, which will have state and local police out patrolling our roads a little bit heavier. In fact, starting Friday afternoon, the state of New Jersey will be enforcing a seat-belt crackdown which they have called "Click it or Ticket."

But should police be concerned with a silly seat-belt offense by focusing on enforcing a law which is broken on a regular basis?

I'm sure that we can also agree that Memorial Day Weekend is a holiday where booze is a key element in celebrating those who have served our nation. Maybe this is a armchair fallacy, but when you put together a heavy drinking holiday with a heavy traveled holiday, the first thing that comes to my mind is DUI.

State budgets have been cut and this includes cuts to police forces. I speculate that this weekend's "Click it or Ticket" seat-belt crackdown is to capitalize on the increase in travel and ticket senseless drivers not wearing their seat-belt, in order to generate some revenue.

Unfortunately for New Jersey citizens, this means an increase in surveillance and a "Big Brother is Watching" feeling. Police will be breathing down the necks of shore-bound folks to make sure their seat-belt is on and fastened.

Wearing a seatbelt should take a back-seat (no pun intended) on the priority list of stopping motorists. There are certainly bigger fish to fry than simply not buckling a piece of metal. 

Wearing your seat-belt should be a choice, not a mandate. Why is "Big Brother" once again inside of our property telling us what to do? Society today has become passive to the laws that our state have mandated upon us, and we simply don't care about being regulated and violated.

Not wearing my seat-belt does not infringe upon the civil liberties of someone else; it only puts myself at harm, therefore why should it be illegal? The government and law needs to take more of an adversary role in situations like these.

Local and federal laws should not dictate how a citizen should live their life. Who is the state to decide that seat-belts are safe, and are the right decision?

Now, this weekend, police want to capitalize off this seatbelt law by ticketing for not making the decision that Big Brother wants citizens to make.

By no means am I suggesting that seat-belts are bad and that we shouldn't wear them; instead, the mandate on wearing your seat-belt should be lifted, and the law should let citizens make their own educated decision.

I believe that motorists educated enough to make the right decision. I don't need Big Brother in my car telling me how to live my life, that's for me to decide. After all, don't we live in the Land of the Free?