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Scottie's Playtime 
I recall a couple of decades ago when driver’s licences were changed to include a photo ID. There was a lot of concern that it would become a de facto ID card. Then a few years later it was proposed to make it mandatory to have your driver’s license with you when driving. I and many others petitioned parliament not to make it compulsory but the law was passed regardless. I keep my driver’s license in the car but don’t carry it with me on principle. I have no desire to see it or any other document become a de facto ID. At least we aren’t required to carry any documentation in the car such as insurance or ownership papers.
The only identity I carry with me is my MedicAlert bracelet which has my migraine symptoms engraved on it and my MedicAlert membership ID which first responders can use to find more medical details and next of kin. And that’s a personal choice.
When travelling overseas whenever permitted, I’d leave my passport securely locked in the hotel safe rather than carry it with me, but in some countries it’s mandatory for non-nationals to carry ID at all times.
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Hi Barry. That is grand you don’t have to have insurance and registration with you in your car. We do. You do have 24 hours to show the police your license if stopped for cause. Our license was changed and upgraded recently to what they call true ID, and you have to show all kinds of documents including birth certificate to get it. But our driver’s license is used everywhere as Identification. To buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store we have to show it. Cars and driving are so pervasive in US culture that it is only in large cities do you find a lot of people without cars. Those people still either get a license or they have to go to the trouble of getting a state ID. Which is much more limited in how it can be used as ID. Best wishes.
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I’ve had a driver’s license for about 40 years and cannot recall a time when I did not have a photo on it. It was manadatory then, and is now as well. I suspect each state has it’s own internal requirements, but when a cop in NY stops a car from NH they always ask for that license. And yeah, that license is your id almost everywhere.
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basically this is in conflict with almost anything we’ve ever been taught about proper behavior toward anyone else no matter who YOU are and no matter who THEY are
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But when we the people had the chance to stop this in the US and our states, we didn’t. The Voter ID laws passed at both state and federal levels are what opened the door to this. The whole thing then was, “what’s the big deal about showing your ID to vote? You have to have it with you anyway, to drive and to do banking and whatnot.” I was among those who called that out, and noted the differences, but there weren’t enough of those who cared, or bothered to see past the fog of the September plane crashes and USA PATRIOT, and believed it wasn’t a big deal to show your license/ID to vote. And here we are, as was stated back in the early 2000’s. It’s getting to be where a person has to put their ID on a chain and wear it around their neck, these days. Makes me miss the 2000’s, when it seemed like it was getting to be where a person had to put their ID on a chain around their neck. Ah, the good old days…
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Hi Ali. The ID to vote thing is misleading. You do need to show ID to register to vote which I am fine with. But to require ID to cast the vote I am not in agreement with. Your voter registration should be enough. I just go in and give my name, the person looks my name up in the big books, and then asks me my address. I get my ballot and vote. Well what if someone votes in your name, you dispute the vote and then prove who you are. I have never had a problem. Now I know DeathSantis has been pushing for it to be a requirement to show ID to vote, and they do that because they have convinced their republican voters that somehow every brown person voting is in the country illegally and stealing a vote. I agree with you on the show your ID thing. Hugs
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I’m sorry. I’m not sure how but somehow what I wrote is misunderstood. I didn’t write or intend to imply that no ID was required to register; I didn’t even mention registration. I said Voter ID.
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Hi Ali. My mistake. I misunderstood what you were trying to say I guess. Normally when people talk about voter ID they mean when they go to vote. That was what I was replying to. I guess I am not sure though what you were saying about needing ID to vote and what I wrote in reply. It is something that shouldn’t be but too many were told others who shouldn’t vote were doing it, so they needed the extra security. I worry about those who can’t get a secure ID like native people or older black people. I had to pay for a copy of my birth certificate but what if I did not have access to a computer to find out how and order it, or the money to do so. I am not so much worried about white people like us, but those without our advantages. Hugs
Of topic but it always pisses me off. Why does my birth certificate show my abusers as my parents? Shouldn’t there be a line for adopted or something. I hate it. Hugs
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Well, I have some work experience with this one. Your birth cert is your record of coming in to existence as you. Birthgivers can put whoever they want on the certificate, but usually when there is an adoption, the certificate will show the adoptive parent(s) as parents, because legally and for all purposes, they are the parents. It’s legally the same as being a birth parent.
It also spares you having to carry around a separate record of adoption, so there’s that!
Before the early to mid 80s, adoptions were very private proceedings, with the intent of protecting a birthgiver’s privacy when a pregnancy was outside of marriage. One of the saddest adult cases I worked with was a young woman in 1992, who needed her adoption file because she needed to get background health info so she could safely begin a family. She was adopted 30+ years earlier in a private adoption, and the records remained sealed by order of the court & state to protect the mother. The young woman was so frustrated because she knew so many people who’d been able to get their histories, but she couldn’t. By 1992, open adoptions were common, and the states all had mechanisms for adoption, private or open. But before then, so many adoptions were handled in law offices, with the office filing the certificates and records the way they were asked to by their clients.
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Hi Ali. Thank you. I always wondered how they got their names on my birth certificate when they adopted me as far as I know when I was about to turn three. For so long it has horrified me that the people that put me through hell have their names as my legal official parents. It seems a mockery of the word parent. I lost it but after my adopting mother died I went through her files. I found a file that had documents showing her father who had a very large profitable farm paid my real father money and all costs for my adoption including the trip to join her husband in Vermont. I hate to say it because it hurts so much but I was sold and bought like something on a store shelf. Hugs
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It does seem like that when you’re the person who was put up for adoption, and especially after what you then experienced for a childhood. It does feel like that; kiddos have told me that. At the time, it was probably the best everyone could do in a time when there wasn’t as much knowledge, and a fear of something costing too much. Maybe you can think of parent, in this instance, as a strictly legal term meaning the adults a child goes with. It’s a legal record term. You don’t have to use the term in regard to the people who adopted you. Or any of them, if you don’t want to!
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Hi Judy. Yes you are correct. But these are the bullies we all faced in grade / high school growing up. Only now they have the power of the state / government behind them. Sadly Stephen Miller never got over the feeling of being less than he felt his whiteness should have given him in his new school. He was in a wealthy white kids school, his dad lost all their family money so he had to go to a local public school. A school that was majority brown. Majority minorities and he couldn’t accept that they were equal to him, a white boy. He so hated that he had no more status than his brown classmates. He has kept that hate for them until he could get in a position to remove them from what he feels is his white country. Hugs
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