Warning! Failure to Warn

Causes Common Sense!

You know you’re old if you can remember when government just governed, enforcing the laws and otherwise letting you go your slovenly, ill-considered way in peace.

Back then, you had to call your mother or get married if you wanted a stream of unsolicited advice. Now it comes at every turn, and a groups of doctors wants more of it, noting that the national government that warns us against tobacco, alcohol, cholesterol and countless other perils has shockingly failed to warn us about hot dogs.

Not the nutrition stuff.  All hot dog packages already admit their nutritional contents in the confidence that hot dog eaters have already decided that nutrition be damned, they want something that tastes good.

No, the shocking oversight recently revealed is that failure to chew a big bite of hot dog can choke a kid. And the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wants something done about it – a warning label, or maybe a redesign of the hot dog.

After all, the government already warns about small objects on toys and other products that could be choking hazards. Why not warn parents of the roughly 57 million children under the age of fourteen about hot dogs?  Doesn’t the government know that 77 a year of those 57 million kids (.00000367 percent) choke to death on food, some of it a hot dog?

Although raw carrots, grapes, nuts and other foods can cause choking, the hot dog is the focus of AAP concern. They are doctors, after all, and triage is part of the job.

Once hot dogs carry appropriate warning labels or are redesigned, we can move on to other pressing issues being ignored by government at all levels:

          * One hundred percent of babies born in the United States will eventually die, according to the government’s own statistics, but there is no federal, state or local mandate calling for appropriate warnings on birth certificates.

          * Except in rare cases involving capital punishment, the government compounds its failure to tell citizens they are going to die by also not telling them when, where or how.

Those are but two of the most compelling examples of government failing to warn its citizens against every possible hazard. It is only thanks to the groups like the AAP and the media that we are able to tell our federal government to stop worrying about the economy, terrorism, wars and other distractions and get busy on hot dogs.

We should also give the AAP and media a round of applause – after, of course, warning that sudden, loud and sustained noise has been identified as a cause of deafness.

Not to mention dumbness.

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