Broken Laws

If you’ve ever lived in an apartment, you’ve gotten mail for previous residents. Some people leave without forwarding addresses, and some mail comes after the forwarding has expired. When I first moved into my apartment, I got a ton of it.

The problem is, you can’t just throw it away. It’s a federal offense to do so. A felony. And in case you think they never prosecute, according to some attorneys, they actually have on occasion, when, say, it’s a summons that’s ended up in the trash. Now, I don’t know if anyone has spent the maximum time in a federal prison (five years), but that’s not a place you want to spend any time in.

I did some research on other laws you might be breaking without knowing it, but I won’t bore you with them since most of them you won’t be breaking if you have any common sense. But I was shocked today when, after mentioning the “wrong mail” law to some of my colleagues, they launched into a conversation about laws they’ve broken while being fully aware of what they were doing. Not just talking, but bragging. I left the area. I didn’t want to hear it.

Okay, the statute of limitations probably applies to most, if not all, of what they’ve done, but really.

Which brings me to this point: don’t talk in public about things you don’t want posted on social media. When I got home tonight, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and saw that one of these braggarts had, in some detail, listed one man’s, shall we say, youthful indiscretions. Okay, she didn’t name names, and I didn’t know who she was talking about. I’d done my best to forget what I heard, and frankly, I don’t know most of the people involved, but goodness.

We live in an era where anything you say or do could be reported, or worse, recorded, and there’s not much we can do about it. Some of that works in our favor. A friend of mine accidentally left her wallet at the checkout in the grocery store, and when she went back to get it just minutes later, it was gone. She called the police immediately, and discovered that not only did the store security cameras identify the person who took it, but a middle school-age kid taking random videos (he was bored) caught the thief in the act. His mom had called the police to turn over the video.

The world is moving so fast that I can’t keep up with it. The mail law I described above I’ve known about for years, but I don’t know if there even are any governing social media specifically. I know the industry has taken steps to self-regulate, and my guess that is in part because they don’t want government stepping in and telling them what they can and cannot do.

That was the motivation behind the Hays Code of the 1930s, which regulated what you could and could not say or do in moviemaking. It, in part, led to the Golden Age of Hollywood, when, in my opinion and that of many others–including some top filmmakers of today–some of the greatest films of the 20th Century were made.

Self-regulation is a good thing, if not always reliable. Take Twitter, for example. It self-regulated, then was sold to a man who doesn’t seem to think the rules apply to him. Frankly, a lot of social media is too big to regulate. I don’t follow Tik Tok, but I know it’s huge. Probably beyond regulating fairly, to be honest.

Be careful in today’s world, and do what you can to be fair. That’s the best we can do in some situations.

Image Credits: Mailbox © cherylvb–stock.adobe.com; Video Camera © luliia–stock.adobe.com; Scales of Justice © Sikov–stock.adobe.com; Movie Making © Jag_cz–stock.adobe.com