Canadian Woman Arrested For Not Holding Escalator Handrail

             It was 2009. Bela Kosoian was in a subway station in Laval, Canada, a suburb of Montreal, minding her own business… or so she thought. Suddenly, she was ticketed and arrested, a police officer taking her by force. Her crime? She had refused to hold an escalator handrail.

 The horror! Is there no end to human lawlessness and depravity?

 The officer pointed out the pictogram clearly stating the instruction to “hold the handrail,” The Canadian Press reported. Incredibly, the uppity Ms. Kosoian did not consider the image to be an absolute obligation, according to the article. Therefore, the officers had no choice but to detain her for half an hour and issue her two tickets totaling $420. Yet, only three years later, Kosoian was somehow acquitted of the charges.

 Ms. Kosoian had the temerity to file a $45,000 lawsuit against the Montreal Transit Corporation, the City of Laval and the officer who decided to arrest her, according to an account by The Montreal Gazette. A Quebec court denied Kosoian’s suit in 2015, as did the Quebec Court of Appeals two years later. The Supreme Court of Canada, however, recently agreed to hear the case. Let’s hope it makes the anarchy-loving Kosoian an example to all those who blatantly refuse to cling to germ-ridden escalator handrails while standing firmly on solid escalator steps.

We often get so distracted by inconsequential things like the society-altering invasion of illegal immigrants and the hundreds of thousands of babies aborted every year, that we sometimes don’t focus on truly serious issues such as people not obeying authorities’ signs instructing them to properly clutch an escalator’s handrail. I say throw out her frivolous suit…and throw the book at her! If government authorities post signs telling their citizens to bark like a dog, then those citizens should be damn-well compelled to bark like a dog.

If the courts don’t act with vigor, we will soon be overrun by folks who don’t follow the step-by-step instructions on bathroom hand-dryers and who willfully remove the tags from their mattresses. There could even be a worse scenario: we could find ourselves living amongst those who do not faithfully observe the Government Food Pyramid Guidelines.

None of us should want to live in a society that screwed up.