Does Anyone But Me Ever Wonder About Stuff Like This?
by Joe Pulcinella
Every year, I pay $36 to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to register my car. In return they give me a little sticker that signifies that I paid $36 to Harrisburg. It doesn't ensure that I am a competant driver nor does it signify that my car is safe to drive. It just tells cops that I paid $36 as a good boy should. Vin Suprinowicz obviously thinks about this kind of thing, too.
I got my high school diploma in 1968, in an eastern land far, far away. In the ensuing 30-odd years, no one has ever asked to see it. I certainly have never been asked to send in money to get my high school diploma "renewed," or to report my new residential address so that could be permanently engraved on my "new, valid, Nevada" high school diploma, or to go on and pose for a "new diploma photo."
The one I got in 1968 is still considered good.
The year before I got my high school diploma, I got a driver's license. It was a plain piece of greenish cardboard with my name and date of birth on it – no photo.
Why isn't that still good? When I change my address or grow a mustache or shave it off, does that alter my ability to remember the shape of a stop sign or how to parallel park?
Of course not. What passes for a "driver's license" today is just a way to squeeze more money out of us to keep a huge police-state tracking bureaucracy at work – paying for our own bondage through an internal passport that allows the officer's onboard computer to access our Social Slave number and through it all the details of our lives, the very kind of "travel papers" that American audiences used to boo the Gestapo men for demanding of railway passengers in the old movies set in Nazi Germany or occupied France.