Of Frisbees and Freedom

To a Kansas boy of the 1960s, California seemed the promised land. The siren songs of the Golden State blared through the tinny speakers of every transistor radio, its alluring image flickered through every television and shined from every drive-in movie screen, all promising endlessly sunny days of hot rods, bikini girls, beach parties, and an unrestrained rock ‘n’ roll freedom unknown to the staid and stiff-necked prairie.

Now we see that you can’t even toss a Frisbee on a Los Angeles beach.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has imposed a $100 fine on anyone so irresponsible, so reckless, so dangerously anti-social as to toss a Frisbee or football on the beach, with the penalty escalating to $200 for a second offense and $500 for habitual recidivists. That a California government would prohibit footballs from its beaches is not surprising, given the manly nature of the sport and the offense a pigskin might give animal rights advocates, but a ban on Frisbees, the most ingenious creation of the venerable Wham-O corporation and a cherished pastime of slackers everywhere, proves that the California dream is dead.

The rule represents a relatively small loss of liberty, and will likely go unnoticed by the vast majority of Los Angelinos who don’t indulge in the Frisbee habit, but it’s yet another outrage in the accumulation of petty tyrannies that is gradually overwhelming civil society. It’s not just the 2,000-page bills that seek to regulate entire industries, but the rules being added at every level of government that tell people to buckle up, wear a helmet, sort your garbage, buy the toxic light bulbs, act according to government dictates on hundreds of decisions that were once left to you, and then submit to a search of your pockets at City Hall when you go to pay the fine.

So many rules make outlaws of everyone, no matter how mild-mannered and conscientious. When a father playing catch with his son is a scofflaw, the same as some Frisbee-tossing hippie, it has become impossible to not run afoul of some regulation or another. As people discover they can’t possibly be in compliance with all of the thousands and thousands of rules, many will inevitably decide they need to obey any of them.

The overabundance of rules is everywhere in America, but is always worse in locales once famed for their tolerant and permissive attitudes. California’s Frisbee ban is but the latest in a long, long list of nit-picking rules promulgated by that state. New York City won’t let you put salt on your French fries, much less carry a gun or exercise other rights taken for granted in more benighted areas of the country. Don’t even get us started on Santa Fe, New Mexico, or Martha’s Vineyard, N.Y. College towns are the worst, with even free speech under assault from the forces of we-know-best.

There are no beaches here in Kansas, but those of us who resisted the seductive charms of California can console ourselves with the knowledge that our state is still wide open for Frisbee-tossing. They can take that Frisbee when they pry it from our cold, dead fingers.

— Bud Norman