(I’m still offline. My computers are mostly still in boxes, but Verizon won’t turn on our DSL until nearly Labor Day, so what’s the rush?)

Anyway, yes, the truck is now unloaded. It took us 1.5 days times three or four workers to load it, but three people unloaded it in just over 5 hours on Tuesday. (It was supposed to be Monday, but if we wanted a more reliable service we could have paid a couple of thousand dollars more and got one.) We packed during a heatwave; it was probably 90 or 95 degrees in New Jersey. Here in the desert it was probably no hotter … but “it’s the dry heat” so much more comfortable.

Speaking of comfortable: we liked to killed ourselves loading the truck, because we didn’t have those hernia-preventing belts that people who lift things us. It took about a week before our backs began to un-cramp. Lesson learned: we each got a back-saving belt (about $12 at Lowe’s) and only a day later our backs are fine.

So far all we’ve unpacked is our beds and a couple of dishes. Now that the truck is unloaded (and should be disappearing today sometime) we can take as long as we want to unpack our boxes. Years, even.

I did take seven boxes of books to the church. I only did enough unpacking to find my NA27 and JPS Tanakh. The rest I can unpack anytime.

We left New Jersey late Saturday, travelling through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee (again), Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, before arriving here in New Mexico today. And do you know what? The prettiest one of the bunch is this one. It’s not even close. I don’t mean that Tennessee is ugly. There are pretty things the whole way. But one look at New Mexico and you can immediately consign all the others to “also ran” status.

…in Clinton, Oklahoma, where we visited the Oklahoma Route 66 museum here today. Route 66 has a special significance to all veterans of Dr. W’s Summer Greek, so I was careful to get some photos I can mail him someday when I get a proper computer setup, Real Soon Now.

My computer setup right now is anything but. I’m blogging from a hotel lobby. They have free wireless high-speed internet, like just about everyone else on the interstate, but I’ve got an old iBook G3. I never got Airport for it, because it cost too much. It wouldn’t cost anything to add it now, if it was an Intel box running windows, but Macs are basically un-upgradeable by design once they’ve left the factory.

I’ll sign off now; I was only checking my email. (Yecch! I had to use Internet Exploder. I wonder what kind of spyware is monitoring my keystrokes and where it’s being emailed.)

The apartment where we live (for a few more weeks) is located on a corner. We see a lot of people go by on their way to the pool or to the childcare center. Some of them are kids on bikes. And with the exception of one (1) family, it seems as if none of the kids wear helmets. There’s nothing more common than to see a family unit walk by in the morning or afternoon on their way to or from day-care, with the kids on some kind of bike, the parents walking alongside, and the kid not wearing a helmet.

This strikes me as falling into the same category as making a pit for the neighbor’s ox to fall into, or watching an enemy’s donkey wander away.

So I wish that these people would make their kids wear helmets, or not ride bikes. And so does the state of New Jersey. As the saying goes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

I’m not sure whether it should be a law. As a citizen of the republic, I tend libertarian (lowercase ‘l’) in my politics, so I would probably favor elimination of the law. I’d prefer the legislature to make more general laws — “no endangering your minor children” — and then executive-branch agencies and the courts could figure out in specific cases whether not wearing a bike helmet was child endangerment, juvenile delinquincy, or what. That way the legislature wouldn’t have to write and keep continually up-to-date a raft of laws defining all the different ways kids could be endangered. (The bike helmet law would have to follow the trends as people’s interest moved between mopeds, Segways, razor scooters, skateboards, roller blades, unicycles, and so forth.)

But the point is that it is a law, here, and these people are scofflaws.

They are not protesting it as an unjust law. They aren’t sending overtures to General Assembly feebly trying to pressure state legislatures into overturning a bad law. No. They’re simply ignoring the law, because it’s inconvenient to them.

Now put aside for a moment that bike helmets make sense. Put aside the responsibilities that a parent has not only as a citizen but also as a Christian, for the nurture of their children. Put aside even the Christian ethical matter of obedience to the civil magistracy. (We’re not talking about bad laws here. A parent letting their kid crack their head open isn’t Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)

What galls me is that from my interactions with neighbors, from a quick survey of the number of cars that (still!) have “Kerry-Edwards” or “God is not a Republican” bumper stickers, and from the prevalence of hyphenated last names, it’s clear that the seminary’s married student housing trends more blue than red. So it’s likely they will continue to vote for more dumb laws and the politicians who propose them. Even the evidence from their own lives, they will not or cannot learn that some good ideas don’t make good laws.