You’re Not a Boiling Frog, But You Might As Well Be.

I’m sure you’ve all heard that you can boil a frog to death if you put it in a pan of room temperature water, stick the pan on the stovetop, and put a low heat under it. The story goes that the temperature will rise so slowly that the frog will die because it won’t ever notice that the temperature had risen too high. Now, there is some debate about whether that can really happen or not, but for our purposes, it doesn’t matter. The concept works as a metaphor for the present day situation wherein overzealous government officials have stolen away out freedoms, little by little, until we are no longer outraged by affronts to our dignity that would have caused riots in the streets just a couple of decades ago.

Does that sound like overwrought rhetoric? I admit, I hesitated to even use the metaphor because it gets misused so often. But I think it’s accurate. Take this story from our neighbors to the north.

Jesse Sansone is a resident of Kitchener, Ontario. His daughter, who is 5 and in kindergarten, drew a picture of him with a gun fighting “bad guys and monsters”. Now, if you thought to yourself, “I like that. That’s how a little girl is supposed to think of her Daddy”, I’d say you’re pretty normal. Obviously, you would not qualify to be an Ontario government bureaucrat. Stafferss at the school school contacted Family and Children’s Services, who promptly called the police, who met Mr. Sansone at the school when he arrived to pick up his daughter and two other children at the end of the day. The police arrested Sansone and told him they were going to charge him with possession of a firearm.They separated him from his children, strip-searched him, and stuck him in a cell.

Ridiculous, right? Kind of makes your blood boil a little? Oh, but the story gets worse. I’ll go to the news report for the rest.

While Sansone was being strip searched at the police station: told to disrobe, lift his testicles and bend over, his wife was home with their 15-month-old daughter.

“They came to my house, told my wife that I had been charged with possession of firearms, that she would have to come with them, and that Sundae (their infant daughter) would have to go with the social worker,” said Sansone. Stephanie called her Mom who rushed over to take Sundae instead.

“My littlest is still in diapers with a bottle. Thank goodness my mother-in-law lives nearby,” Sansone said.

Once Stephanie got to the police station she had to wait.

“The detective was giving my wife the idea that our children were at the police station with her, just in another room at the station. She was waiting for over an hour, close to two hours, not knowing where the kids were,” Sansone said.

His children had been at Family and Children’s Services, being interviewed by social workers.

In the meantime, the police searched his house and found a gun — a toy gun that shoots those little foam darts. So, after hours of detention during which his dignity was violated in the most intrusive fashion, his kids removed from him and questioned without any of their parents in the room, and his wife taken to the police station and removed from her infant daughter, the police released Sansone. The story does not say whether he was actually charged with a crime. I’m hesitant to say he was released without charges because even though the police didn’t find a gun, there’s no guarantee they didn’t dice to charge him anyhow and let the prosecutor sort the whole thing out. So it’s entirely possible that, after a day in which he was treated not as a free citizen of a free nation but as the vassal of a totalitarian state, Sansone will have to live with a potential court trial over his head.

But even if the police released him without charges, there is no happy ending to this story. As Sansone notes several times in his account to the reporter, he had to explain to his children why the authority figures they should regard as protectors and worthy of respect took their daddy away in handcuffs. He will likely have to explain that to the youngest children several times. There is every reason to believe his young daughter, whose picture triggered the entire episode, was traumatized by it. He’s going to have to spend some time reassuring her that she didn’t do anything wrong and that she wasn’t the reason that the police took Daddy away.

Little girls should think their fathers keep them safe from bad guys and monsters. But that’s now how it works in Ontario, where the bureaucrats fulfill both roles and hold the power to put monster-slaying Daddies in jail simply because their little girls draw them as gun-toting heroes.

Now, here’s my question. When will we see the angry mobs take up their pitchforks and torches and lay siege to the Ottawa government until every one of the tyrants involved in this decision be places in stocks so that they can be properly humiliated? If this isn’t worthy of outrage, then what is? Have we all gotten so inured to the petty tyrannies of government that we’ll just read this and shrug it off? Sure, it happened in Canada and that’s an awfully long way away from most of us. We probably won’t have to worry. After all, it’s not like our government would do something as intrusive as take away a little girl’s healthy lunch because it didn’t conform to Federal Little Girl Lunch Guidelines (see Episode 134 for details).

You may not be able to boil a frog in a pot of water, but you can boil away the rugged independence of a people, and it doesn’t take that long. All you have to do is strip away the little freedoms, one by one over the course of a few decades, and pretty soon they won’t blink more than a couple times if you lock them up because their little girl drew a picture of a gun.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Health Care You Can’t Believe In
• Next They’ll Come After Second-Hand Alcohol and Fourth-Hand CO2.
• So, When Did Harry Reid Stop Beating His Wife?

Tags: Canada, Featured, Nanny Fascism

Category: The Rise of the Nanny State