Could He Have Predicted ComplainantThink?

We long ago reached the point in our societal processes where anyone and everyone can be found criminally and/or civilly liable for someone's ignorance, save that someone their own self.

It is this Orwellian groupthink approach to personal responsibility or the worldwide redistribution thereof that has fostered a whole host of current cultural afflictions, some annoying but benign, others egregiously malevolent.

An example of the merely moronic is the labeling of products, such as warning the users of wood chippers that they can be more than exclusively arborially utilized. (For a Hollywood-produced visual aide, see Fargo.)

My Defendant Has A First Name, ...

Another would be the do-gooder crusade to bring to an end any activity that is at all enjoyable. This would include, but is certainly not limited to, the smoking of anything (including fatty meats), the imbibing of adult beverages, and the consumption of items containing sugar or the aforementioned dietary corpulence.

Many are truly damaging, to our sanity certainly, but also to our economy and thereby our lives. The expansive litigiousness that has arisen to exact the fiscal pound of flesh for this dispensed culpability has resulted in glaring deficiencies in many important areas of the average existence.

Especially hard hit is the insurance industry, as legal overre-action has dramatically increased the rates for homeowner, business and automobile coverage and priced many people out of medical protection altogether.

Snidely Whiplash for the Plaintiff, Your Honor

The common thread amongst all of these communal torments, and many uncited more, is the plaintiff attorney.

As a gaggle, plaintiff attorneys have done more to make more with and more out of less than anyone, at the expense of common sense, individual imperative and myriad industries that have done nothing but put at great risk great sums of capital in the endeavor to provide goods and services to the rest of us (how dare they).

Where Have You Gone, Unlitigiousness?

We are sure that some suit, somewhere forced Mr. Coffee to indicate in triplicate that the fluid produced by their product is more than warm. R.J. Reynolds and their tobacco brethren have already been raked over the multi-billion dollar coals, and surely Hostess and Anheuser-Busch have been in touch for their counselors' numbers.

Every turn of the courtroom stile causes the prices charged by the latest victim of the litigious drive-by to rise precipitously, which of course hurts us all.

The only thing worse than a plaintiff attorney with dollar signs in his eyes is one who has instead in his sights The Cause, whatever that idiotic Cause might be. To unite liberal shyster altruism and a willing claimant (See: the A.C.L.U.) is to wake the dead, or at least name them as co-defendants.

Which brings us to our harmonic convergence moment of the day, a smooth blend of the Godlessness, benightedness and lawyerly inanity we utilized to nomer this journalistic missive.

For we have Shannon and David Croft, a Dallas, Texas couple that has filed a complaint charging as unConstitutional the Lone Star scholastic moment of silence, because they say it is "a ruse to get prayer in school". One of their apparently unruly progeny was told by an elementary school teacher to be quiet, for the minute was a "time for prayer".

A Moment of Silence

Amongst the named suitees is Governor Rick Perry, because he clearly directed this specific educator to describe the moment thusly. The instructor, however, somehow escapes being named as a co-appellative.

While the Crofts are at it, why not also name every Legislator in both camerals who voted in the affirmative for the legislation in question? They are all just as (in)culpable as the Governor. (Wethinks we smell some Perry-specific visceral vitriol in all of this.)

We now arrive at the ignorance portion of the program, in this case of the law. What follows are direct excerpts from the actual statute text:

(It Should Be) Easy As ...

C.S.H.B. No. 793 - AN ACT relating to pledges of allegiance to the United States and Texas flags and to observance of one minute of silence in public schools.

(b). During the one-minute period, each student may, as the student chooses, reflect, pray, meditate, or engage in any other silent activity that is not likely to interfere with or distract another student. Each teacher or other school employee in charge of students during that period shall ensure that each of those students remains silent and does not act in a manner that is likely to interfere with or distract another student.

Oh where oh where has the mandate for prayer gone? Oh where, oh where can it be?

That there are people as woefully ignorant as the Crofts, who either can not, or choose not to, know that the misstatement of one teacher does not instantaneously cause Texas code to be rewritten to fit their atheistic and litigious fantasies is but a sign of the new times. So too is the sadness that there are undoubtedly myriad attorneys beyond just the retained Doctor of Jurisprudence Dean Cook ready to go to the moronic mat on their behalf.

And the fact that there are more people currently in law school than practicing the craft bodes quite ill in this regard going very far forward.