Too much regulation is counterproductive.

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Bend Oregon builds fences, Counterproductive laws, Crazy making fences, Don't fence me in!, Too many fences, Too much regulation

We just got back from a beautiful walk around Pilot Butte. It was phenomenally warm for mid January at 56° F, and everyone we met and spoke to on the trails commented on the balmy weather. It was a perfect day, if you weren’t a skier. I took a few pictures along the way, but to some small degree I wasn’t as pleased as I might have been. It was the damn cyclone fences! About a quarter of the circumference of the butte has cyclone fences on one side or the other of the curiously named Nature Trail and about 400 yards has these high fences on both sides. What a bummer going for a nature walk sandwiched between a cyclone fence around a public state park one one side and another cyclone fence around a public Jr. high school on the other. I mentioned this to a runner, who paused to talk to us, and he said it was part of the fight against global terrorism – a part of the National Security effort.  I think he said it with a bit of a sarcastic tone, implying the fences are crazy, but someone paid good money to put them up. The Gods must be crazy! You can easily walk to either side of these fences across open country.

Viewing the wilderness of Central Oregon from the Nature Trail. 

This is a photograph of Debbie viewing the wilderness of Central Oregon from the nature trail through multiple layers of chain link fence. Note the additional fence the other side of the fence she is looking through on the left and two more layers up the trail on the right.

School bus behind chain link fences circling a large playing field.

A couple of hundred yards along the Nature Trail which circles the base of Pilot Butte a fleet of school buses circled a general purpose playing field, going the opposite way. We saw absolutely no children near this school, but it was obvious the school was in session because there were many cars and buses parked in the lot the other side of the buildings. These school buses reminded me of prison buses, with bars on the windows, which transport prisoners to secured court houses from secured points in prisons, these are all within high walled and gated enclosures. These kids aren’t criminals, but they are being treated in a very similar way.

The football field is behind multiple high chain-link fences. Google Earth at 44.064 -121.282

Notice that behind the near fence there is an intermediate one and then another one before the track that goes around the football field. Notice in the distance there is another fence, and no doubt beyond that another one. There is every effort made to protect these kids from us, the innocent public, and the public from them, the innocent kids. To the back of the camera is a high scree slope of an old gravel pit. It is about as safe a place as can be created, and even if you flung yourself down, the worst damage you could do would be some abrasions from the gravelly soil.

These fences are strangely misplaced, because only a bit more than a mile to the south-east begins the three hundred miles of almost uninhabited desolation. The google earth photo dated 8/31/2006 shows none of these fences so it’s a new paranoia which is constructing these monstrosities. Probably a self-imposed paranoia based on frivolous lawsuits themselves based on the attractive nuisance hazard of a flat surface, like a football field, where people might hurt themselves. So now kids and adults who want to run a track or play in an open field must do so in the privacy of their own computer. These frivolous attacks on reasonable behavior are destroying freedoms and are making Americans fat and lazy. It makes me feel better about being old, because I didn’t have to put up with all of this nonsense in my youth.

Too much regulation is as bad as too little. We need appropriate laws.