| Wednesday, January 25, 2006 |
19:17 - That sheep may safely graze
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I'm sure there must be some significance to the fact that the pervasive reaction to things like this so often seems to be that the situation can only be rectified by rebellion.
Because there's no way a majority of intelligent adults made a decision like this of their own informed free will. Not here, not there, not anywhere. Nope—it's obviously a failure of democracy, not a joyous expression of it. So it's to be revolution, to rally the true rulers of the country and lead the poor misguided sheep of the greater populace from their folly—or else accept the death of freedom forever.
It makes me so tired.
I was watching a CSI episode the other day in which Nick Stokes was going through the locker of a teenage kid who had rented a jetski on the lake and subsequently gone missing. Stokes found the kid's wallet, opened it up, looked at various credit cards and pieces of ID, counted the $30 or so in currency, catalogued the wallet's contents, and put it in an evidence bag. It was only a few minutes later that I realized just how remarkable a thing I'd just seen: a TV show in which a character representing the police finds a wallet full of money—and he examined and bagged it, instead of helping himself to its contents. (It would have been so easy! Who'd ever know? It's the prerogative of the police! So many justifications!) And that wasn't even the remarkable part: the remarkable part was that this was presented as a completely unremarkable happenstance. It just passed on by, not as a plot point, just a bit of detail to flesh out the scene. Just another day at the office: pursuing truth, upholding the rule of law, taking home an honest paycheck.
Does anyone even grasp what a marvelous time in human history this is? Or how precarious and fleeting, historically, the situation where we can afford the luxury of living by the rule of law? Where we not only don't see the law itself as a rough set of clumsy guidelines that can and should be skirted by anyone with half a brain, but we fetishize it in hit TV shows?
Or where people routinely elect their government in a process that follows perfectly orderly rules between contestants who are ultimately in it for the same reasons, and where even if it entails a shift in power, it means nothing in the long run but that the names on the news crawl are going to change?
Dean Esmay had similar thoughts the other day. I was about to let it all just pass on by, but it seems that some people are determined not to let this moment in history slip past without layering on some unseemly hyperbole.
If people had even an inkling of what "rebellion" really entailed, especially in a country like the USA or Canada, they wouldn't dream of bandying the word about so freely.
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Brian Tiemann
