the law

I used to believe…

that when a police officer was arresting a criminal and read them their rights, when they said anything can and will be used against you.. I thought that if you said crabs or alligators or spiders... they could use them to torture you on the witness stand.

When I was a kid back in the mid 70's they sere just starting to push the no drinking while driving law. One day while I was out with my aunt we stopped to eat lunch. She didn't finish her frink and she took it with her. I bit my tongue as long as I could then I saw a cop and I blurted out "AWWWWW Aunt Linda your not sposed to drink and drive!"

When I was 5 my dad grew marijuana in his room and I'd always go inside and take a look at it. It was a tall beautiful green plant with an aroma that was TO DIE FOR. I asked my dad what it was and he said it was his garden that I couldn't look at anymore, but I'd always walk in and watch him prunning buds of the plant and weighing them out. I thought that since it was his garden these were the fruits that it bore. So I thought pot was a fruit of some type and dad was putting it in our dinner.

when i was a kid, i believed the news far too literally. when the news reporter said "a man is helping police with their enquiries" i thought a nice bloke had gone to the police station on his day off, with notepad and pen, and said offered to carryout interviews.

When I was little I was making my bed one day and ripped the "do not remove under penalty of law" tag off of the mattress. I hid the tag in my dresser for years fearing that I'd get caught and arrested. Funny thing ... I still never remove those tags from anything I buy.

When I was little, someone made a comment about kids going behind the middle school to "do pot". I always envisioned a group of teenagers in the woods hanging around a big boiling, bubbling witch's cauldron (you know, the "pot").

When i was little I lived in an area where there were some kidnappings, and i was the neighborhood know it all. Well my parents told me that this kidnapping was happening and that the man drove a white van, so every time i saw a white van (the one w/o windows, you know the ones) I would hide, no matter where it was, especially under cars. Do you know how many clothes i ruined! I thought that all white vans would take me away and i would never see my family again.

We had a juvenile detention center right down the road from my house, and my father used to say that they'd send me there if I was bad. I'm not sure if I ever wholly believed this, but it sure looked like a cold and scary place. I really didn't like the idea.

My oldest son believed that if you went outside without your shirt on the police would arrest you. We figured out later that he had been watching "Cops".

When I was about five, our neighbors got busted for growing Marijuana. While we where watching the police take the guys away, I asked my mom what they'd done. She said that they’d been growing grass, meaning the slang term. I, not knowing anything about marijuana nor slang, was both scared and confused. I got scared thinking, "We're growing grass" and then confused when I thought "why are they arresting just these guys, almost everyone has grass!"

I used to believe that burglars came into our house every night to kill us, and the only thing that protected me from them was pulling the covers all the way over my head. This used to get very hot, so I decided that they could not kill me if just my head was showing.

I used to think that people who experimented with drugs actually put them in test tubes and did chemistry experiments to see what was in them. (I couldn't see how that would be any fun.)

I used to believe when a criminal got out of jail and was on probation that he had to go see an officer (or counsilor) once a week AND pass drug tests - or go back to jail. My sister's ex-boyfriend proved the movies and tv shows lied.

The police brought my kid brother from somewhere. Don't ask me why they brought him to us though! I guess we were supposed to punish him for dirtying his diaper.

This is from the good old times when i was young and innocent and didn't know about french kissing - I always wondered about that strange kind of kisses the people on screen enjoyed and my mother told me it was illegal to kiss each other the "real" (child safe) way on stage and so they did id that way.

I'm American, and I used to believe that when people were bad, they went to see the police; but when people were REALLY bad, they had to go see the President of the U.S.