Absurdity, Defined.

Concord fires first shot in water battle

CONCORD — For years, Jean Hill has been reading about the environmental consequences of the countless plastic bottles filling landfills and polluting local waters. She has watched as other towns around the country have cut purchases of bottled water, which she views as a wasteful, environmentally damaging alternative to tap water.

This week, after lobbying neighbors and local officials for months, the 82-year-old activist persuaded them to take more drastic action than perhaps any other municipality in the country: At Town Meeting on Thursday, Concord residents voted to ban all sales of bottled water.

Wow. Can you say futile gesture? So Concord bans the sale of bottled water. Do they think that folks are going to stop drinking bottled water? Do they hope that this will spread to other cities and towns across Massachusetts and then across the country, resulting in a Poland Spring-free utopia where the unicorns promised by Øbama can frolic in 500 mL plastic bottle-free fields of amber grain?

Look, I'm not a huge fan of bottled water. More often than not, the water coming out of your tap is not much worse and, in a good number of localities, better than what you spend perfectly good money for at the grocery store. It has its place, though - when we have Cub Scout outings, we'll pick up a case of the small bottles to hand out to make sure the boys keep hydrated. It's a valuable lesson for them, as we make sure they clean everything up (Leave No Trace)

Buried in the article, on page two, is this little gem:

For Hill and other environmental advocates, bottled water is unlike other products, because there’s a ready and free alternative at the tap.

First off, a hearty "DUH". Secondly, if this isn't the most emblematic icon of the leftist creed out there, I don't know what else is. We don't like [thing X]. There's a perfectly good alternative to [thing X] that costs less and is better for the environment. Do we:

A) Work to educate people why they should use less of [thing X] and more of [free thing Y]?

or

B) Ban [thing X]?

Leftists choose option B at an alarming rate. Even though they themselves will admit that there is a perfectly valid alternative that people could use - meaning that a little public information might be all they need - their first thought is to ban the things they don't like. Rather than take the harder path of educating people to make better choices, they go straight to the "we don't like it so we'll use the power of government [men with guns] to make it go away".

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, it most certainly should.

That is all.