By way of an illustration, I’ll share a personal experience that reasonably represents the nature of the situation. When my auto insurance renewed a few years back, the rates went up significantly, because I had a “suspended license” appearing on my DMV record a couple of years earlier. This fact turned up during the ‘renewal’ process and my DMV records were checked as a part of the insurance company’s routine. As it turns out, a drivers license suspension stays on one's DMV record for 3 years before it ‘drops off’, at which time, I’d be able to get more reasonable insurance rates again. But until then, I was gonna pay for it. Because they see a suspended drivers license as a bad thing.
When I acquired Guilliam-Barre I was transferred from the hospital into a rehab facility. One of the admission steps was to submit a suspension of my driver's license to the DMV. It’s just ‘the procedure they follow’ there. Fast forward 6 months, I’m back on my feet, I’m driving, hell I’m even climbing to the top of Vernal Falls and back, without issue, yet the basis for the suspension in the first place was irrelevant to the insurance company. Their process was to increase the rates if a suspension is on file. There’s no ‘type’ or ‘reason’ factored into their actions. They just saw “a suspension” and my rates shot up. End of story. Period.
I went to my insurance agent and discussed it with him, face-to-face. He understood, he even empathized, but there was absolutely nothing that could be done because there’s no distinction as to the reason. WHY I had the suspension did not matter to the process. The “specifics” did not matter. The details that shed so much light and reasoning, negating the negative connotations of the generalization, did and do not matter. I was being punished because that’s just how it goes.
Specifics REALLY need to matter when it comes to punitive actions and negative connotations. If I’m speeding to the hospital because my son’s having a seizure in the car, do I warrant a speeding ticket? If I’m 20 and the girl who lied and told me she was 19 turns out to be 17, should I be branded a sex offender and a criminal? If I break the car window to rescue a dog left in the heat, am I cited for destruction of property? If I see flames through a home's window and force my way through a screen door to alert the occupants, am I charged with breaking and entering and sent to jail?
In a country where ‘innocent until proven guilty’ has been espoused as the mainstay of a fair system of objective judgment and justice, when our societies values are supposed to protect the innocent, even from generalized assumptions, well it seems to me that we’ve veered far off-course and we’re veering even farther into a system that takes immediate action against people based on reactive judgements and immediate presumptions of guilt, based on mere accusations, without any due process, but with extreme and unfair bias.
The current social and political climate seems so ready to pounce on anything salacious that surfaces. As an example, a high-profile tech exec was recently fired for having had an affair with another employee. It was nothing at all on the Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby level of abuse, it was completely consensual, but it against a corporate policy that seems in this day and age to be really outdated and puritan in nature. The response itself seems excessive, and frankly, I bet there’s a shitload of ‘holier than thou’ hypocrisy going on around this sort of thing these days. Finger pointing can be a diversionary tactic, too. At this rate, we seem to be on our way to reviving “The Scarlet Letter” and branding prisoners.
Our society should be not based on black and white presumptions. There should not be a rush to judgment. Yet everything seems hyper-focused on this current “bandwagon”, jumping on it, pointing fingers, and making aggressive decisions that negatively impact potentially innocent peoples lives. Also, the fear of standing up against unfair judgements, going against the tide of presumed guilt, has a cost on those unfairly judged as well as to those doing the judging, and making decisions based not absolute knowledge of a true wrong-doing, but instead, being complacent and not risking the judgement of others because they stood up for the rights of an accused.