Rules
Signs.
No Fishing.
Don't Walk.
Stop.
Yield.
Bio Hazard.
Caution.
Yield.
Do not kill.
What is your reaction to rules?
Do you cherry-pick what you believe applies to you?
I'm in a hurry; the speed limit doesn't apply to me; I have an appointment.
I'm late.
You're in my way.
Why are those rules there anyway?
If someone stops you on the street and asks you for directions, do you spit in their face?
What are rules good for?
Many of us perceive rules as restricting us.
Laws restrict our freedom.
Buckle up.
The seatbelt is uncomfortable.
Don't text and drive.
I have to make that call, or they won't like me.
The misconception about laws, about rules, about signs, is that they restrict you.
Somebody put up that sign to stick it to me.
I'll do what I want when I want to whom I want.
Nobody can tell me no.
Nobody knows what I've been through.
Laws are there not to restrict just you.
Rules were not created to cramp just your desires.
Rules of behavior are not in place as a form of punishment.
Laws are there to protect you from casual disregard and violence.
The biggest rule of all: Do not kill.
It's there to protect you from being killed.
It's laying down a moral line in the sand that says all life is precious.
This is the only experience that we will ever be guaranteed to have in the life we live now.
No one has a right to that life except the person living it.
Your belief stops at the point of your nose.
That moral law, do not kill, is saying not just to you but to that other person who you made angry in line at the store, you cut them off because you were in a hurry, that they do not have the right to take vengeance on you and take your life.
Because you were being an asshole, shitting everywhere you went.
That person who is reckless and texts and drives just like you in the car next to you, that restriction is there, so they don't t-bone you and cripple you for life.
The 'Don't Walk' sign is there to prevent you from ruining someone else's life by blindly ignoring your own self-interest and stepping off the curb into oncoming traffic.
They run you down in the crosswalk because you deserve to die.
After all, you were in their way... don't you know how important they are as compared to you?
Society has rules for a reason, and that reason is to make life better for everyone.
Everyone.
Rules are not meant to deprive you of your freedom or your choice.
Rules are there to protect you.
It's stopping other people from harming you.
It's about saving you.
To keep us all safe.
It's not just about you.
It's about all of us.
We, the People.
Laws provide a foundation of protection from the misdeeds of others.
It's the grease in the machinery.
Without that grease, the gears of life will grind and tear us all apart.
Our society would implode, and that wouldn't be good for anyone except the scavengers.
The vultures.
The Nihilists.
Yesterday, up in the air in North Carolina, scavengers were circling.
The smell of racism was evident in the air.
The President, who has been put in charge of our Republic, encouraged the buzzards to partake of the rot he served them.
Since his campaign, he has fed a steady diet of the red meat of racism to the bigots among us.
The assembled crowd was confident in their jeers that this nation was not founded upon the principle of freedom and justice for all but only for the White race.
That principle?
From many one.
The wound that has hollowed out the American heart.
The wound which has never been cleaned since the Civil War.
We, as a nation, applied a temporary bandage and hoped that the gangrene of racism would somehow cure itself.
Here we are today, in the first half of the 21st century, grappling with a law established in 1776.
Freedom, justice, and the right to happiness for all.
That bandage that covers the rot of racism must be ripped away so that the light of justice for all mankind can shine upon that wound and heal it once and for all.
How long are we going to ignore our own stink?
How long does it take for a people to understand that freedom is for all?
Black, brown, white, men, women, children, straight, gay, from many, one rule.
Freedom means, in this great American experiment, the capacity to extend love beyond self to the person I don't know, in recognition that they, too, are human and will extend that same love back to me.
The grease.
The sign.
The law.
The rule.
Through love, all things are possible.
Peace
Daniel J Frey aka Toby