Lawsuit Happy.

If you believe all of your emails, the nation is a lawsuit happy place.

Fortunately, most frivolous lawsuits are either entirely fake or missing a few key facts that show that yes, someone was criminally negligent and should have paid for it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are frivolous lawsuits. The judge in DC suing a dry cleaner for $54 million because they lost his pants. Some criminal named Jonathan Lee Riches suing things such as the Eiffel Tower, Pluto (the dwarf-planet), and the book Mein Kampf.

But I would not be surprised to see so many lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, as it is the only way to get anything done.

In the sixth grade, my father did not want my sister and me to ride the school bus that serviced our neighborhood because of a few problems with our neighbors. (My sister was threatened by an asshole her freshman year on the bus. The school did nothing because I guess it wasn’t in their jurisdiction or some BS. We went to the cops and filed a complaint but nothing came from it as they misfiled the paperwork and dropped the case without informing us). My father requested that another school bus that went by our neighborhood to pick us up so we didn’t have to deal with all of the idiots. My father asked the district about a week before school started. By the first day, no response. He took us to school. Second day, no response. He took us to school. On the third day, my father wouldn’t be able to take us to school because of work. He told them that if they didn’t get us a bus for the next day, he would bring his lawyer. Sure enough, they arranged a bus for us for the third day. (To be honest, the bus that did pick us up was filled with equally as big dicks and when I rode the local neighborhood bus as a freshman, there were no problems).

More recently, my coworker that used to give me a ride into work was having some family problems. Her sister’s daughter was seeing an asshole skinhead and she had the guts to leave him. He started leaving messages on their phone like “I will kill your family in their sleep” and “I will burn your house down”. Now, most people would consider these messages as threatening as he has a past history of violence and his racist little buddies may be involved with the disappearance of another person. The mother instinctively saved all of the messages and took them to the police.

“Sorry, there’s nothing we can do” said the local police.

The mother being a very smart and strong woman told the police officers if there was any way that they could document their meeting, so that if something bad happened, she would have proof that she tried to contact the police and they refused to help her.

The police immediately put a detective on the case and the detective said there was more than enough evidence to arrest the little asshole.

Why are so many police officers so lazy that they will not do their jobs unless they are sued, threatened to be sued, or are given bad press because they did nothing? What do you mean there is “nothing we can do?” You can do plenty! You have evidence! This person is clearly violating a law!

My family got this a lot when people would ride their ATV’s on the street or in the field behind our house (clearly against the law) and we tried to call the police. The police had to catch them in the act. I guess if a burglar fled into the night after stealing some stuff, there was “nothing they could do”, as they hadn’t caught him in the act. I guess opening a file is out of the question.

Also, we got the same response when kids would ride their bikes on private property. The police told us to get proof. When my father got a camera and got pictures of them trespassing, they called the cops on my father claiming he was taking pornographic pictures of minors (even though they were fully clothed and were not in any sexual position). Fortunately, my father was not home and my mother explained to the police officer why he was taking those pictures (the police TOLD him to!) and that they weren’t sexually explicit. Of course, the kids didn’t get in trouble for calling the cops for a false report.

Looking back, all that ATV and bike trespassing crap seems so stupid and not worth the energy to get angry over. The ATV’s were annoying, but who cares? The fact that the police kept giving us excuses for why they can’t do anything was probably the worst part of the experience. It didn’t seem fair when we got in trouble for not displaying a building permit for a fence and that our fence was against the building code because you couldn’t see through it and that might lead to all sorts of illegal happenings behind the fence while another person had a fence you couldn’t see through! (Of course it doesn’t matter if you can see something happening as the police have to catch you in the act of committing a crime!). I don’t think our town knows what the purpose of a fence is.