Can I see your License?

It's staggering the number of things you need a license to do. The most obvious would be to operate a motor vehicle. One might argue that the process to come by one of these is noticeably lax in some of our surrounding states, as evidenced by the sketchy maneuvers of those bearing CERTAIN license plates I see every day. 

Thankfully, one needs a license to practice medicine, and those seem to be a bit harder to come by. You need a license to sell real estate and to teach. You need a license to sell alcohol or to attach those fake acrylic nails to other people's fingertips. 

There is of course Poetic License, although I must confess I've been operating on a suspended for quite some time now. Perhaps the most perplexing license to me is a fishing license. Clearly there is no criteria to get this. If you walk upright, you can probably outsmart a fish after all.  Probably.

The real kicker though is that any goof-ball with some DNA to spare can have a kid. No one asks you to pay any fee, take any class, or pass even a minimum competency test. 

Can you imagine a World free of carpet crawlers zipping by you on heelies in the mall? A line at the Post Office that doesn't include some rugrat hanging from the rope barrier? A news broadcast free of stories of babies left in hot cars for 14 hours? Not to mention a distinctly less-burdened welfare system, where no one is popping out that next running nose for the extra $147 a month in benefits? 

I think there needs to be a process for this. I think there should be an 80-hour class, followed by a six-month internship before you can even take the test. You should have to pay a $100 fee to get this childbearing license, and it should have to be renewed every 2 years. 

I think that once people reach the age of puberty, there should be a lockdown on the reproductive bits (like a shock collar???). If for some reason anyone circumvents the lockdown and procreates without a license, the offspring should be subject to immediate seizure by the appropriate government agency, then auctioned off to the highest (licensed) bidder to raise more money for schools. 

Better yet, if any self-proclaimed parent is found guilty of allowing their children to crawl under tables in restaurants or through rounders in retail stores, stick gum to anything not in their own home, or put waffles in DVD players, they should be fined excessively. 

Further, those kid leashes should be made illegal in all 50 states. A public-ridicule penalty should be implemented for anyone found to be in possession of those Baby Einstein DVDs (teach them YOURSELF, darn it!). No one under the age of 12 should be allowed to take karate classes. And those bumpers people put on the corners of coffee tables should by law have to contain high levels of lead, arsenic, or both, just to enforce a Survival of the Fittest philosophy. 

Finally, we need to repeal No Child Left Behind, and institute a policy where, should students misbehave in any way at school, the punishment would be NOT that they get a 2-day vacation (aka suspension), but that both parents should have to attend school WITH their child for a week per each infraction. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say about that!