May 29

The States Explained

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Like all Dads, my father sometimes seemed to be practicing for a world’s most boring man competition. He used to have the habit, when I was a boy, of identifying and reporting the state of origin of all the other cars on any highway we happened to be travelling along.

In America, as I expect you know, each state issues its own number plates, so you can tell at a glance where another car is from, which enabled my father to make observations like, ‘Hey, another car from Wyoming. That’s three this morning.’ Or: ‘Mississippi. Wonder what he’s doing up here?’ Then he would look around hopefully to see if anyone wanted to add a comment, but no one ever did. He could go on like that all day, and often did.

I once wrote a book making good-natured fun of the old man for his many interesting and unusual talents when behind the wheel — the ability to get lost in any city, to drive the wrong way down a one-way street so many times that people would eventually come and watch from their doorways, or spend an entire afternoon driving around within sight of an amusement park or other eagerly sought attraction without actually finding the entrance. One of my teenaged children recently read that book for the first time and came with it into the kitchen where my wife was cooking and said in a tone of amazed discovery, “But this is Dad,” meaning me.

I have to admit it. I have become my father. I even read number plates, though my particular interest is the slogan. Many states, you see, include a friendly message or piece of information on their plates, like “Land of Lincoln” for Illinois, “Vacationland” for Maine, “Sunshine State” for Florida, and the crazy “Shore Thing” for New Jersey.

I like to make jokes and comments on these so when, for instance, we see Pennsylvania’s “You’ve got a Friend in Pennsylvania”, I turn to the passengers and say in an injured tone, “Then why doesn’t he call?” However, I am the only one who finds this an amusing way to spend a long journey.

All this is by way of introducing our important lesson for the day, namely that the United States isn’t so much a country as a collection of fifty small independent nations, and you forget this at your peril. It all goes back to the setting up of a federal government after the War of Independence when the former colonies didn’t trust each other. In order to keep them happy, the states were given an extraordinary range of powers. Even now each state controls all kinds of matters to do with your personal life - where, when and at what age you can legally drink, whether you can carry a concealed weapon, own fireworks, or legally gamble; how old you have to be to drive; whether you will be killed in an electric chair, by lethal injection, or not at all, and how bad you have to be to get yourself in such a fix; and so on.

If I leave our town of Hanover, and drive over the Connecticut River to Vermont, I will find myself suddenly subject to perhaps 500 completely different laws. I must, among much else, buckle my seat belt, acquire a license if I wish to practice dentistry, and give up all hope of erecting roadside hoardings, since Vermont is one of just two states to outlaw highway advertising. On the other hand, I may carry a gun on my person without any problem, and if I am arrested for drunken driving I may legally decline to give a blood sample.

Since I always buckle anyway, don’t own a gun, and haven’t the faintest desire to stick my fingers in people’s mouths, even for very good money, these matters don’t affect me. Elsewhere, however, differences between our state laws can be dramatic, even alarming.

States decide what may or may not be taught in their schools, and in many places, particularly in the Deep South, textbooks must accord with very narrow religious views. In Alabama, for instance, it is illegal to teach evolution as anything other than “an unproven belief”. All biology textbooks must carry a statement saying “This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things.” By law, teachers must give equal weight to the notion that the earth was created in seven days and everything on it — fossils, coal deposits, dinosaur bones — is no more than 7,500 years old. I don’t know what slogan Alabama has on its number plates, but “Proud to be Backward” sounds apt to me.

This Article is from: Health matters[http://stevenlichen.com]

URL: http://stevenlichen.com/2007/05/29/the-states-explained/

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