Congress Knows Best? Cell Phone Ban

No surprise here, Congress is exercising its power over our personal behavior. Not any power granted them by our constitution, mind you, but that power which we allow them by not standing up for what's right.

You may agree with them regarding the cell phone ban, but your crazy if you think banning cell phone use will prevent people from annoying you on planes. All the people who've annoyed me on planes were intent on conversing not on their phones, but with me. Gazing at an open, nearly finished novel has not deterred them. Listening to music on head phones has not deterred them. Closed eyes and my head on a pillow has not deterred them.

Like many laws of this kind, the in-flight cell phone ban one will fail in its objective while punishing the innocent. In the close and terribly uncomfortable confines of airplanes, we will still be annoyed by annoying people, and polite cell phone use will still be banned.

Of course, as always, people will excuse this blatant overreach of power with the tired old rationale: Well, we don't need to use our phones in flight. Think that's true? Imagine you're away from home, and a loved one has been rushed to the hospital. You'll not be able to send or receive calls in flight to check on them.

Or better yet, remember 9-11-01 and the passengers of flight 93, who used their cell phones to speak their last words to their loved ones. Also, because of cell phones, they learned of the other attacks that morning. As we know, without this information they believed they simply were being hijacked. Because of what they learned on cell phone calls, those heroic Americans subverted their hijackers ultimate plan to crash them into hundreds more innocent people.