A Good Pistol Whipping

You know, lately I find myself gripped by an overwhelming desire to smack some people upside the head.  The rude and the inconsiderate need a good beat down.  I’d start first with those people who treat bookstores like libraries.  Why are these individuals allowed to lay in the aisles reading novels without paying for the item?  How is that not theft?  And why do paying customers have to walk over these human speed bumps?  They never bother to make room for anyone to get where they need to go.  Common sense and common courtesy isn’t just dead, it’s been cremated and Willie Nelson is smoking his ashes in his lucky skull bong.  There is so little common sense that Thomas Paine is spinning over in his grave so rapidly that there is talk about hooking him up to a turbine to light up the Vegas strip.  You can’t get off an elevator anymore without colliding with some idiot who is trying to spawn upstream onto the elevator while everyone else is trying to get off.  You can’t get in your car and not run into another idiot who pulls into the gas station with her fuel tank on the wrong side and then has to get instructions from a NASA team at Houston Control to figure out how to maneuver her car so that the tank is on the correct side.  What happened?  It would seem a chalk outline is slowly being drawn around common decency and common sense and most people can’t even identify the victim.  Sure.  I know I’m coming across like a 90 year old man frustrated with the neighborhood kids who continue to throw their ball in my backyard, but I’ve had it!  I just heard another story on the news this morning about someone who sued a coffee shop because she spilled coffee on herself and was burned.  She said it wasn’t her fault, sued for $3 million and won!  She won!  We have trouble convicting people who actually confess to murder, but this woman is able to take three mil of a coffee shop.  If the judges had any common sense, the trial should have gone like “Will the plaintiff please rise?  Yeah, it is your fault.  You’re stupid.  Coffee is supposed to be hot.  Why didn’t you blow on it before you chugged it down like a pledge having his first beer?  Get out of my courtroom, you stupid, stupid woman and take your pin-striped parasite lawyer with you.  Next case.”  Where does common sense come from?  It’s slapped into the back of your head by your mother when you try and touch the hot stove.  It’s the Dodge Ram crest branded onto your forehead for all of eternity because you didn’t want the seat belt to wrinkle your new shirt.  Lack of common sense and common decency were easily dealt with in the Old West.  Repeatedly crossing the line in either area ended at the point of the gun.  As Humphrey Bogart’s character said to Herman Brix’s character in Treasure of Sierra Madre when Bogart learned Brix has been stealing water from his land.  “Next time you try that, I’ll let it out of your through little round holes.”  If bookstore owners took that approach to the thieves sprawled out in the middle of the aisles….  Who am I kidding?  I think I need coffee.