Not-so-new affliction continues to be a part of life

D on't look now, but there seems to be an epidemic of RSI in our midst.

Oh, you ask what RSI is? Well, as the above reference would indicate, it's a disease of sorts. And it appears to target politicians and bureaucrats.

But to get to the point, RSI stands for Really Stupid Ideas. And like the malady known loosely as "the flu," RSI occasionally affects all of us. Who among us cannot think back and identify a decision that, in retrospect, was a huge error in judgment?

But when government is infected with this illness, it can turn into a massive plague.

For instance, the latest example of Uncle Sam's case of RSI is the notion that building a fence along the United States-Mexico border is really going to make a difference.

This Really Stupid Idea not only won't work, but it is becoming a gigantic public relations nightmare.

For instance, these fence builders are making plans to actually wall off parts of the United States from the rest of the country. They're plotting a fence line that will take private property from landowners and put it on the Mexico side of the barrier.

In the Rio Grande Valley, an entire golf course is falling on the wrong side of the fence. So now the geniuses in charge of this engineering snafu are trying to arrange some sort of security gate that can be used to access the golf course.

Meanwhile, you can bet that people determined to leave Mexico for the friendly and more lucrative United States already are working on ways to go around, under or over the dumb fence.

And just so we all appreciate what a big undertaking this is, the feds are using our money to construct this "grate" wall. (Get it? All the trouble, expense and time being expended on this project grate on a great number of people.)

Meanwhile, us ordinary folks will have time to sit back and wonder just how many immigrants will end up with jobs building the fence. And we can speculate on how long it will be before the Mexican equivalent of Ronald Reagan comes along and becomes a part of history by declaring, "America, tear down this fence!"

But RSI has been around for a long time. It jumped up and bit us all in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, RSI contaminated darn near every effort to provide relief to victims in the weeks after the storm.

RSI has gotten us into wars, as well as plenty of embarrassing international situations.

In most cases, billions of dollars are spent on Really Stupid Ideas generated by our federal government. Ever wonder how much was wasted on the failed experiment known as Prohibition? Similarly, how much has been invested on our highly touted war on drugs that really has done little to dry up the supply of narcotics? In fact, we just seem to be getting more and more varieties of drugs despite the truckloads of money being thrown at the problem.

We could probably go on and on recalling well-intentioned efforts that eventually amounted to cases of RSI. In the sports world, baseball has mandated that coaches on the field at first and third bases wear protective helmets after a minor league coach was killed last year by a batted ball. Well, that's all well and good, but the dead guy was struck in the throat. RSI.

Oh well, we have a system, and a pretty good one overall, that makes our "leaders" want to appear they're actually doing something of worth.

To be sure, good things have come out of this process. But a thorough survey likely would show that RSI prevails most of the time.
Maybe there ought to be a law against RSI. On second thought, that is a RSI.