alexpgp | Feeling "guilty"?

My response to a post by LJ friend

volkris (which I am "promoting" to a journal entry), wherein he expresses chagrin with people who say they are made to feel guilty when asked to submit to a drug test. The test, he says, isn't to determine guilt, but truth.

There are good reasons why one might feel "guilty" at having to take a drug test.

While the purpose of a drug test may, as you say, be to "determine the truth," the same could be said of a search of your dorm room, or any demand to produce identification, for whatever reason. Guilt has nothing to do with having your room searched, or being told to pony up your driver license, right?

But the fact is that not everyone has to take a drug test. It's not a universally routine procedure, like showing your license when you write a check (at least, not yet). Cops don't search people who they think are innocent, and despite the legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty," cops are widely thought of as the folks who arrest criminals and who find evidence by searching for it (your mileage may vary in places like Watts or Harlem).

But don't worry. As our population becomes desensitized to such invasions of privacy (not to mention the shredding of the Fourth Amendment), people who are "asked" to repeatedly submit themselves and their possessions to any and all searches and examinations demanded by schools, stores, corporations, employers, and cops will stop feeling "guilty" as these demands become universal.

(By contrast, there is a paragraph in Heinlein's Tramp Royale, which is an autobiographical work describing a trip he took around the world with his wife in the 1950s, where he recalls how incensed he was when a hotel in Colorado insisted that he show a personal identification before they'd rent him a room. He ended up taking his business elsewhere.)

Cheers...