Just Sign Here
Religion & Liberty Online

Just Sign Here

Those three words Just Sign Here are what you’re told when you sign up for a cellphone, or buy a car or take out a bank loan. And it’s what you’re told to do when you buy a house whether or not there’s a mortgage. Just the buying part involves many disclosures about the nature of the property and pages of stuff to read and acknowledge. Over the years I’ve heard more than one escrow officer admit, “if you read all that stuff you’d probably never sign it.” But most of us learn to read it all — carefully.

My own children have been “misinformed” with at least one of their cellphone providers. “Yea but,” my daughters would tell me while complaining about a bill they had received. “They said I’d get free minutes and that I could quit anytime I wanted. I didn’t think they’d be charging this much, Dad.”

“Where’s your contract,” I’d ask.

“There’s one online somewhere — I think.”

Where am I going here? Healthcare Legislation and Climate Agreements.

Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada in The Senate of The United States of America will preside in that assembly over the next several days and press the elected members who are supposed to represent the citizens of their individual states, to vote on a proposed piece of legislation — ObamaCare — that they very likely will not have read, shown Republicans in the Senate or digested in conference. They are calling the exercise “historic” and brow beating anyone who is challenging them. As I write that includes 62% of the citizens in the U.S.A. according to pollsters.

In Copenhagen an assembly of what appear to be anti-Capitalists from around the world are pressing their enablers to agree to a treaty [read “law among nations”] that will commit the “rich” to pay the governments of the “poor” money — huge sums of money — to offset effects of climate change. This is happening within the context of what seems to be a gigantic hoax recently revealed by some errant emails. The Copenhagen idiocy is having its problems due to an issue of sovereignty. Some countries don’t want people looking at the way they spend money brokered to them through places like the United Nations [think Kofi’s son and the Iraqi oil for food scam and the French diplomat who skimmed millions off the top for personal gain and remember that the majority of nations in the UN have governments that lack “a rule of law.”].

For the Republicans and most politically conservative thinkers, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell describes the situation at his web site. But I’m drawn to the more mundane remembrances of times past when my childen rushed and made a bad judgement in the mobile user they signed with.

Only in America can elected officials exhibit the same lack of common sense when reading a contract as do so many of our teenagers.

Ken Larson

Ken Larson is a businessman and writer who with his wife recently moved from their native state California to a semi-rural part of Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay. A graduate of California State University with a major in English, his eclectic career includes editing the first "reloading manual" for Sierra Bullets [something that earns him major league credibility when picking crabs with new friends on Sunday afternoons] and authoring a novel about a family's school choice decisions titled ReEnchantment, A Schoolboy's Adventure. His web site is http://www.reenchantment.net. For ten years, Ken was the only Protestant on The Consultative School Board for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange near Los Angeles and chaired their inaugural Catholic Conference on Business and Ethics in support of needy parish schools in the diocese. He continues to be active in his new community and mindful of America's civic education malaise.