"Hooked" wrote in message
...
"Lazarus Cooke" wrote in message
om...

What's more in a lot of parts of scotland fishing on a sunday is
illegal. The scots are a god-fearing bunch.



Sounds like what some of the religious fanatics here in the States want to
do.

Impose their self centered ideas on everyone's rights.

Actually, it sounds more like the situation that, until recent decades, held
sway here in the U.S. for a couple of centuries. When I was a boy, growing
up in what was then a small city of fifty thousand or so back in the
fifties, Sunday, as a "day of rest", was a long standing tradition accepted
by virtually everyone. True, "rest" was already interpreted somewhat
differently than it had been in the heyday of religion's grip on secular
life, and a distinct aroma of the change to come was already in the air, but
Sunday was still markedly different from the Monday through Friday work
week, and even from Saturday, the other weekend day. Saturday was the day
to catch up on the personal business that languished through the week. In
rural areas it was the day to go into town to shop. On Sunday there was no
place to shop. In my home town there was typically one drug store open....a
relatively new concession to the fiction that it was necessary for the
maintenance of public health....but that was about it, and it was only
allowed to stay open for a few hours in the middle of the day. Many of the
activities we take for granted....for RIGHTS....were, if not officially
proscribed, then at least heavily frowned upon. And, of course, a lot of
things actually were banned. Prohibitions against fishing or hunting (among
other things) on Sunday do not, for the most part, stem from any actions on
the part of the new religious right, but rather from a hoary religious
mainstream. There are places in the U.S. where you may not legally hunt (or
fish?) on Sundays, but these are not radical new policies.

Personally, and as anyone who knows me will attest, I don't take well to
being dictated to. I guess I never quite outgrew the adolescent male
fascination with whatever is prohibited. But, at the same time, I'm
susceptible to a degree of the same nostalgia for an undoubtedly idealized
past that eventually strikes virtually all of us who live long enough. For
all the many very real faults of an era that, among other things, encouraged
rampant institutional racism, held women in vitrual chattel slavery, and
viewed expressions of individuality as suspect at best, it's still hard to
deny a certain bucolic charm to a past that enforced a periodic break from
an ever more frenetic lifestyle. It is interesting and instructive, I
think, that apart from the weather there is nothing in American life today
that generates more impotent complaints than the pace of modern life. The
irony of this impotence in the face of much vaunted and jealously treasured
personal freedom is, of course, sublime.

As for rights......well, most of the uninformed and specious twaddle spewed
forth about them (which is to say nearly everything) has been masticated and
spit out so many times by so many people of questionable moral and
intellectual hygiene that even looking at it is more than can reasoanbly be
asked of anyone lacking a fascination with excretory functions. Thomas
Jefferson was, by all accounts, an extremely bright individual. His use of
the damnable adjective "inalienable" can hardly be viewed as accidental and
thus, as two centuries of inane nattering clearly demonstrates, his
disingenuousness leaves him with a lot to answer for. Rights come.....and
they go.

Damn sure would be nice if they went fishing more often instead of sitting
around complaining about the rest of us fishing!!

Physician, heal thyself.

Wolfgang