Busy Citizens

by Christina Hazelwood
On August 3, 2009, the Westmont village board voted in favor of an ordinance that requires landlords to obtain licenses and renters to allow village officials to arbitrarily enter and inspect their homes. The process gave me a front row seat of American politics in action and trust me folks, it wasn’t pretty.

It was similar to having a low-grade fever: an illness that’s not quite bad enough to see a doctor but makes you miserable and irritable all the same. The kind of sickness one cannot get any sympathy for, nor earns you the right to complain. Now that the bout is over with, there’s no cause for celebration, just a slight sense of relief that the thing has come to an end, with an ominous foreboding that it could come on again at any time for no reason.

This article is a follow up to my December 2008 column headed, "Freedom Fight," which reported some of the far-reaching, invasive, rights-eating provisions of the originally intended ordinance. The good news is that after nearly a year of village shenanigans and citizen protests the ordinance has been substantially altered. Numerous absurd and intrusive provisions have been changed, making the approved ordinance bearable. Although it’s no cause for jubilation, as the ordinance still infringes on property rights, privacy rights, creates time-consuming administrative nonsense, increases costs to property owners and renters, and gives village officials control over citizens’ lives. So make that negative one for the people and plus two for government.

The trouble with government, and all those who are in it, is that it is for itself. Be they Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Libertarians or of any persuasion at all, the one thing you can bet on is, that they are for themselves, and by extension, not for you. This means that anyone in government, whether individuals, groups, agencies, branches, or departments, is in favor of not just maintaining position, but increasing power and scope. In the end, government will always opt for more control over you and your money. The longer the individual, department, agency or entire government is in existence, the larger it becomes and the greater its scope, influence and control over its citizenry. There’s only one thing that can slow or temporarily halt its continuous, voracious appetite for more and that’s protest from its citizens. Eventually, however, government will prevail.

The reason why is that we, individual citizens, have our own problems, issues, and lives to deal with. We cannot spend every waking hour monitoring the goings-on of our governmental leaders. We are lucky to catch the news, just to have a clue about what we’re in for next. So while we are busy trying to survive, our political leaders are busy coming up with new ways to control us, take our money and then give it back to us as they see fit.

Take Westmont’s new multi-family dwelling ordinance as a case in point. Apparently those in power came up with the bright idea to institute this ordinance to increase revenue, increase village power and their own sense of importance, all under the guise of protecting residents from themselves. Aren’t we lucky to have such wonderful village officials willing to invade our personal residences to make sure they are up to official standards! And for this privilege, we get to pay them twice!

There is a silver lining in all this, tarnished though it is. Centuries have proved that all governments eventually fail, so the citizenry get a temporary last laugh. Sorry to be the one to break it to you folks, but eventually the great United States of America will fail, just as communist Russia and Rome did. Eventually either the government is destroyed by outsiders, as occurred in Iraq, or it folds from within. In our case, I’m betting on implosion. It should be one hell of a party!

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Village of Westmont

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