Listen up, Prius owners . . .

Your noiseless ride in your Toyoto hybrid is coming to an end. If I understand it correctly there is now a law, fashioned by Congress and signed by the president, that will force automakers to equip hybrid autos and all-electric autos with additional sound-making equipment. The sound must reach at least 20 decibels, the minimum level of noise that is required to alert bicycle riders and pedestrians, particularly blind pedestrians, to an oncoming vehicle and enable them to take evasive action. Whether the law will be retroactively applied to older models  of such autos is unknown, but the demand by the blind will probably mandate the application of the law to all models—I mean, like, hey, you know, an older model Prius will dispatch the blind and the hard-of-hearing just as effectively as the latest models off the assembly line.

My first thought when I learned about the law was of the bicycles. Unless a bike rider produces at least 20 decibels of sound then pedestrians, blind or not, are endangered by bicyclists. When I was a kid we made a tremendous amount of noise on our bikes with clothespins and plastic playing cards. The clothespins held the cards in place, inserted between the wheel spokes—with a card in both wheels we probably exceeded the requirement for a minimum of 20 decibels. I can state definitely that our system worked because I never—not even once—ran into or over a blind pedestrian or a sighted person—never  even  came close! While bikes can easily be configured to produce the required decibels, what can be devised for fast-moving pedestrians? And what about joggers? Both could conceivably endanger blind pedestrians unless they produce the required decibels of sound.

Where does it stop? Will the mindless drones in Congress require whistling shoes, perhaps, or mandate that pedestrians and joggers carry some sort of noisemaker to warn any blind persons in their vicinity? Our government could require fast walkers and joggers to carry any one of numerous party noisemakers to warn the blind and the hard-of-hearing pedestrians.

Perhaps we could follow ancient China’s practice of having someone run ahead setting off fireworks to let people know an important person is coming behind them. Should we embrace that practice, we could hire some of our unemployed to run ahead of silent automobiles with the firecrackers—this would effectively warn any blind persons and hard-of-hearing pedestrians that may be loitering in the middle of the street.

This intrusion by the federal government into the auto industry, a business about which it does not know doodly-squat, is just the latest effort to expand its control over American businesses. The federal tentacles are reaching into virtually all areas of our economy, with government’s intrusion into the health industry the most visible and the most egregious threat to our economy and our well being. We should demand the right to utilize free social services on the same scale as undocumented immigrants—100 percent including professional, medical, educational, recreational and procreational.

The feds are endangering our society and our American way of life. MacDonald’s fries are endangered, school lunches are endangered, soda drinks are endangered and all references to Christianity are endangered, and the list goes on interminably. I have no doubt that at sometime in the near future the feds will place restrictions on our use of toilet tissue, probably restricting us to a maximum number of squares for clean-up purposes. Just imagine how many trees would be saved should we be restricted to one square of tissue—just imagine that!

In closing, I freely acknowledge that mine is a voice crying in the wilderness, virtually unheard and probably ignored even if heard, but one must press on. One must do what one can do, in amounts however infinitesimally small, to retain and enhance our right to flatten blind pedestrians and hard-of-hearing pedestrians, to pollute our atmosphere, to denude our forests, to poison our children with MacDonald’s fries and the heavily caffeined sodas of Pepsi and Coke, to exterminate the whales and porpoises and salmon to provide feed for our pets, and to maintain our American way of life.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!