That's way-excessive. I will say, though, that I have to agree that...
.... the ordinance that says that they wait until 7:00 am before starting their pick-up makes a lot of sense. I could see those things getting started at 4:00 am and 5:00 am, waking up entire neighborhoods.
I think they should say the same things for school buses. We live in a cul-de-sac and one school bus comes in at 6:45 am to pick up one of the kids next door. For whatever the reason, this driver doesn't circle around in the cul-de-sac. She stops, picks up the kid, then puts it in reverse, which means that the loud beeping of the bus ensues, then she drives off.
One thing about us numbering ourselves in the hundreds of millions and living within 100 feet of one another.... rows and rows of us... is there is always somebody who abuses everybody around them, exercising their liberty as they, see it. People ask them politely to please be considerate, but they say they are free and they tell people "KMA." Eventually, people use government to make them stop.
A key element of freedom and liberty is personal responsibility.
Smoking in public is a good example. I think it is a crying shame that it came to getting local and state government involved to finally have to MAKE people stop blowing smoke all around every human being within a 50-foot circle of them. But there is always that small number who are inconsiderate of others that end up screwing it up for everybody. That is exactly how it went down and which led to the anti-smoking laws.
I guess the moral of the story is that our idea of creating metropolitan areas for the sake of an industrial way of life is proving itself, over and over again, to be a really bad idea in the grand scheme of things. That way of life, in and of itself, creates these situations that end up dragging more and more government into our lives. Most of all, though, it is the lack of personal responsibility within the formula for true freedom and liberty. Far too many people have this fantasy that liberty and freedom means they can do whatever the heck they please, wherever the heck they please, at any hour of the day and night, and everybody has no choice but to accept it because "they're free." But that is the polar opposite of exercising freedom.
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." (Benjamin Franklin)
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." (John Adams, October 11, 1798.)
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites-in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity;-in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;-in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." (Edmund Burke, A Letter From Mr. Burke To A Member Of The National Assembly, 1791.)
"Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic
than in the monarchy
How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?" (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I, p. 318.)
