BEE FREE

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you are a bureaucrat or career politician, you’re fully aware of our current economic crisis. And it’s a crisis that has apparently hit the world’s financial capitol. It seems that a New York City bee inspector (yes, you heard right; they have bee inspectors in New York City) recently levied a $2000 fine on a Queens man because he did not have water for the bee hive on his property. The single bee hive was on a residential property that borders Little Neck Bay, and there are several fresh water ponds in the area. The man has also continuously had a bee watering device within two feet of the hive for the past year. But don’t cheer the city for protecting the ever-so-vital-to-our-ecosystem-honey bee. In fact, it is perfectly legal to exterminate the bees. The bee watering ordinance is actually to protect neighboring citizens. Honey bees require a fair amount of water, especially in summer months. To keep the bees from moving into a neighbor’s air conditioning unit, the city requires adequate water to be kept near the hive. Unlike many local ordinances, there is some logic to New York’s bee laws. However, the problem here stems from incompetent enforcement. It appears that many budget-breaking, local bureaucracies have put pressure on their henchmen to extract more funds from the tax-burdened public. In this scenario, it seems that the city inspector did not bother to get close enough to the bee hive to see the obvious water supply two feet away. The man was issued a $2000 fine. When the story hit the papers, radio, television, and internet, the city quickly reduced the fine to a warning. When asked why, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office claimed that city officials had “thought it through”. No apology for the mistake. No mentioned reprimand for the inspector. My question is, “If a man can be fined $2000 for failing to water the bees in his yard, what is the punishment for a city inspector that fails to do the job that tax payers pay him to do?” As tax payers, we agree to financially support jobs like this for the greater good of the whole community. However, our local governments are using civil service as a way to extort more money from the community. I would speculate that for every story like this one, there are many more in which citizens reluctantly, but nonetheless, pay these ridiculously unjust fines. If you are ever the victim of such a fine, you owe it to yourself and the other members of your community to question it, protest it, fight it, tell every media outlet that will listen, and post it and share it everywhere that you possibly can. There are still more of us than them, and we don’t have to be pushed around. Tell them to let us be free of the incompetence. Let us be free of the greed. Let us be free of the deception. Let us be free of the corruption. Let us be free of the bureaucracy. Let us BEE FREE.
If you’d like to bee fashionable and make a point, order your very own “BEE FREE” t-shirt at tshirtguerilla.blogspot.com. Be and let be. Live and let live. Believe in a better America. For T-shirt Guerilla news, I’m Matt Ashel, and I’m not going to take it anymore.