Rules

bb-cartoon-089.jpg

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.


Why are those rules there anyways?


If someone stops you on the street and asks you for directions, do you spit in their face?


Be friendly to a stranger as you would want a stranger to be generous with you.


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.


Laws are there not to restrict just you.


Rules of behavior are not there as punishment.


Laws are there to protect you from casual disregard and violence.


That 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 this life we live now.


No one has a right to that life other than the person who is 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 that they do not have the right to take vengeance on you and take your life.


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 so that you don't ruin somebody else's life when you blindly ignore your own self-interest and step off the curb into oncoming traffic and they run you down in the crosswalk.


Society has rules for a reason, and that reason is to make life better for 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 us.


We the people.


Laws provide a foundation of protection from the miss deeds of others.


It's the grease in the machinery.


Without that grease, the gears of life will grind and tear each other apart.


Our society would implode, and that wouldn't be good for anyone except for the scavengers.


The vultures.


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 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 become rotted on the American heart, 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 wrestling with a law that was 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, child, 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


DFrey