Post Scripts: Have you heard the about that *#!@ Boomer?

Well, I’ll swear! What’s this country coming to?

I guess you’ve heard of Timothy Boomer by now. Or have you been ignoring the news of the day? Oh c’mon. You don’t know this goofy son of a gun who was convicted of having a dirty mouth?

You must have heard of him; he’s gotten a lot of attention recently.

Boomer is a 25-year-old citizen who was taking a fun trip down a Michigan River some weeks ago when, all of a sudden, his boat ran into a rock and Boomer fell right into the darn river.

Many of us know how irritating that is. In fact, it’s dog-goned embarrassing! It’s not only embarrassing, it’s humiliating! Boomer was really ticked off, standing there in the rushing water, getting soaked clear down to his shorts and socks, feeling like a dumb bunny.

Unfortunately, Boomer couldn’t keep his temper, or his mouth shut. In the heat of his anger, he thought he was all alone on that river. So when his lips began to move and his vocal cords shifted into high gear, Boomer began to express his deep-down feelings.

It was fate, I suppose, but another family was boating on the river that day, a man and wife with two small children. This nice little family was having a great time in the beautiful outdoors. The last thing they ever expected was to have a long string of obscenities come flying out of the wilderness.

"What the Sam Hill is going on here," the mother and father pondered, as most of us would have. What they saw was this Boomer character standing in the water shouting a really bad four-letter word. It wasn’t "heck or Holy Mackerel," it was much worse, and the man said it over and over again, maybe 75 or 80 times. The kids were transfixed.

The father said he didn’t know how anybody could say that word so many times in such a short time. He said Al Pacino in the movie "Scarface" came pretty close. Boomer’s friends claimed that he was only saying this word in jest, the comical rascal. Boomer admitted he was pretty steamed up and didn’t think anyone else was within earshot.

The parents weren’t amused since they are against pollution of the wilderness. The father said, " I feared for my whole family. I thought we were at the mercy of a lunatic."

Unfortunately, that family wasn’t the only ones who heard Boomer curse for several minutes. A deputy sheriff testified he was a quarter of a mile away and heard this consarned barrage of cussin’. Under a Michigan law, dated 1897, a person can be fined for using public profanity. How dare any state to pass laws that forbid a person to make a jackass out of himself!

As it turned out, Boomer’s case was not thrown out of court, as his lawyer wanted. The judge said, "if Boomer’s words were constitutionally protected, then a person could stand on any stream bank, or in the water, and shout those words all day."

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of folks who can’t get off a sentence without including words that are so foul and dirty I won’t even mention the first letter of each of them. Oh, I know how it is to get up in the night and hit your toe on the way to the bathroom, and say "Who in the devil put that "decorative" chair there!

The ACLU defended Boomer in court. Don’t they have better things to do?

Sometimes I think that darned First Amendment gets in the way of justice.