You Can’t Handle the Nanny

A comedic take on the Nanny State

“They say if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish.... then he's gotta get a fishing license, but he doesn't have any money. So he's got to get a job and get into the Social Security system and pay taxes, and now you're gonna audit the poor cocksucker, 'cause he's not really good with math.

So he'll pull the IRS van up to your house, and he'll take all your shit. He'll take your black velvet Elvis and your Batman toothbrush, and your penis pump, and that all goes up for auction with the burden of proof on you because you forgot to carry the one 'cause you were just worried about eating a fucking fish, and you couldn't even cook the fish 'cause you needed a permit for an open flame.

Then the Health Department is going to start asking you a lot of questions about where are you going to dump the scales and the guts. 'This is not a sanitary environment', and ladies and gentlemen if you get sick of it all at the end of the day... not even legal to kill yourself in this country. Thanks again, John Ashcroft, you weird bible addict, can't even handle your own drug.

You were born free, you got fucked out of half of it, and you wave a flag celebrating it.” – Doug Stanhope

Unless you’re just returning from a special mission on Jupiter, then you’ve probably noticed this weird new trend going on in the last decade, a trend about safety and protection that is growing to questionable extremes. Anything voluntary and peaceful is now a potential threat to national security, or so they say…

From untaxed lemonade stands to raw milk farms you name it, they’ve raided it.

Nobody remembers exactly how it started or why it came about, some say it started slowly, in increment, like the old analogy of the frog and the boiling pot, little by little, one liberty at a time.

And then one day, just like that, they started arresting people left and right with each excuse getting more absurd then the other, whether it’s for jaywalking, opening your Christmas present too early or even for eating your friend’s chicken nugget…

And if you think that at the end of the day, that good old human empathy would slow them down somehow, you might wanna think again because they even arrest 90 years old grandpas for feeding the homeless.

Wait, what?! Feeding the homeless?

Bad judgment my ass! That’s a missing chromosome.

I get it, I really do, all they care about is keeping safe, keeping us safe from ourselves, from logic, from choice…

And from all these invisible enemies that keep putting our oil in their lands.

Where would be without them, these warm hearted bureaucrats? To them freedom is a dangerous place from which to view the world and life is not worth living if it’s outside of a straight jacket.

But even by those own parameters I still can’t seem to make sense of it for the life of me.

So I invite you to join me analyzing just a couple of short examples to see how far down the road we are.

Blame It On The Rain

The unsuspecting citizen: Gary is a man with a high utility bill and good arithmetic, he looks up at the sky and sees some rain falling down, looks down at the floor and sees some container lying down, so it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to add two and two together, what could go wrong right?

Wrong, when you live under such a loving over-protective nanny state there is no empathy for poor old timers who despicable enough to collect rain water.

The neighbors: They, on the other hand were not able add two and two together so they were not able to understand the strange phenomenon at sight and so they thought of nothing better to do than to call the nanny. It's the civilized thing to do, right?

What's wrong with you people? Haven't you read Red Riding Hood?

The nanny state: What do you mean he shouldn’t go to jail? What if he goes nuts and boils pasta in that untaxed, nature given rainwater?

That wouldn’t taste good now would it? Prison food on the other hand...

Wait, wait, wait… Slow down!

So in order to protect an elderly person from the evils of nature given water, why not take away his freedom, throw him in violent prison surrounded with dangerous people so that he'll be assaulted from time to time? What could go wrong, right?

What could go wrong?? Wrong is not even the same zip-code! We’re talking Sodom and Gomorrah.

Keep in mind, this is no isolated incident, at the lovely rate of 86% of people being hosted at the world’s number 1 jail colony for victim-less crimes, examples of absurdity are not precisely what you call a short commodity these days.

Let’s dive to another example to see what I mean:

Interviewing 13 Different Babysitters and Ending Up Hiring a Dingo

Say there’s a kid that went on a camping trip and forgot his fishing tackle in his car, even worse suppose that fishing tackle contains something so strangely out of place and so dangerously mortifying that freaked the living daylight out of his teacher.

“911, this is an emergency”

“Nanny is it you? I don’t know what to do!
…I think I saw a fishing hook in the tackle box!”

Yep, fishing hooks such a notorious deadly weapons used by the ancient warrior class to kill mastodons.

Thank goodness we have the nanny state to protect us!

She spares no effort to put money from her own pocket and put it in good use - and by 'own pocket' I mean taxpayers money, and by 'good use' I mean destroying the kid’s future of course.

Sure, the relatives of the young man are heartbroken, the state has just destroyed their family, understandable I know, but they just don’t seem to get the bigger picture, it was a hook!

Fishes die on that stuff man, minnows croak, and lest we forget that’s what you get in a surveillance state: Extra protection.

Think about it, they pretty much had to act, what if he accidentally cuts his pinkie by that fishing hook? You can never be too safe!

Again, walk me through this, so in order to protect the kid from a far-fetched minor injury why don’t we send him to jail where his throat might be sliced if he doesn’t submit to sexual slavery?

You see, reasonable judgment by the perfectly sane people in charge… In charge of the very asylum they’ve overrun.
The problem with all crazy phenomenons, is that such ideas inevitably spread like wildfire asphyxiating all competing ideas before you get the time to head for the extinguisher.

Evil Goes Global

The nanny state, the undefeated heavyweight champion of exaggerated fears and dis-proportioned punishments finally grabs Europe, and like her bigger sister in the U.S, she also aims at protecting you from yourself either by forbidding you from protesting from your rights (Spain) attacking your right to free speech (France) or even protecting you from dancing without a permit (Sweden).

In some places they’re going for the little ones, in England for example where they are banning children in certain schools from running in the court yard… I repeat, banning children from running in the court yard!

Why not have them do taxes while you’re at it?

"Next stop, grade school, where he won´t be allowed to play Tag because it encourages victimization and he won´t be allowed to play dodge ball because it´s exclusionary and it provokes aggression…

Standing around is still permitted, but it won't be for long, because sooner or later some kid is going to be standing around and his foot will fall asleep, and his parents will sue the school, and it will be goodbye fucking standing around!" – George Carlin.

Standing around is still permitted, I thought he was joking.