I asked myself this week whether rules, mandates, and laws are necessary? And if they are, why is it that some people break them with impunity while others are held to the strictest codes? In particular, these last few years have been stressful with newly invented rules, mandates, and laws on the one hand and the constant breaking of established rules, mandates, and laws on the other. The constant flux is both frustrating and confusing, especially when the changing rules, mandates, and laws are detrimental to our safety, our education, our civility, and our democracy. Do we even need or want rules, mandates, and laws to govern our behavior?
I suppose what I believe about human behavior informs my opinion about the need for rules, mandates, and laws as well as their enforcement. It comes down to the degree of faith I have that my fellow humans will behave in a public manner that is decent, reasonable and beneficial to society without the assistance of behavioral boundaries. My answer is, “not much”. I don’t have much confidence that my neighbors, family, friends, or leaders will to be considerate of others without them. And yet sometimes the rules, mandates, and laws themselves are immoral and deserve to be challenged. Civil disobedience is absolutely essential to challenge and overturn laws that discriminate and harm people.
Rules provide us with structure within our families, communities and institutions. They are an agreed upon set of behaviors that make our interactions with others safe and predictable. We start learning them as soon as we are born. For example, a rule each of my breastfeeding babies learned was not to bite mama’s breast. My swift and highly negative reaction to that first bite was enough to ensure that not one of them bit me a second time. By kindergarten, most children have learned to share, take turns, to reframe from hitting others, to follow the instructions of the teacher, and to say, “please” and “thank you”. Rules help us to get along with others without continuous conflict and a constant battle of the wills. Without rules, the determined, the strongest, and the bully always gets his way. However, history reminds us that we must be suspicious of rules made by bigots and bullies because other people will suffer. Rules are only enforceable through social means. So, when someone breaks social rules, they experience the displeasure of the entire community. In the past, the fear of public shaming, physical violence, or even death was enough to ensure people obeyed the rules.
Mandates are rules put in place by those whom we have given the authority to lead. It could be a parent, a teacher, a boss, a school board, or a governmental leader. Mandates are rules meant to respond to conditions faced by the community to benefit the whole by keeping everyone safe or helping things run more smoothly. A parent might mandate a new bedtime in response to their kids having difficulty waking up in the morning. A teacher mandates an assignment deadline. A boss might mandate new work hours in response to consumer demand. A school board might mandate face masks in response to a pandemic. And a governor might mandate vaccines to prevent unnecessary deaths and the collapse of the healthcare system. So long as a mandate helps and does not harm people, it should be supported.
And then there are laws. Laws are carefully thought-out restrictions meant to provide legally enforceable guardrails for human behavior in service to the public good. Laws tell us what we can and cannot do within a particular city, state, country, and even internationally. We have police to issue citations or to arrest suspected law breakers and to deliver them to the justice department who determines whether or not there is sufficient evidence to prosecute them for breaking a given law. A jury of their peers might be called upon to determine whether or not the law was broken. And a judge will ascribe the penalty for the crime. In our country, a person convicted of breaking an existing law has the right to appeal their conviction to the Supreme Court if they believe that the law itself violates their rights under the Constitution. It often takes massive violations of a particular law before that happens, making civil disobedience an important tool for overturning unjust laws.
However, what we are witnessing today is a dangerous collapse of our system of rules, mandates, and laws because they are not based on benefiting the public, but on satisfying the immoral desires of bullies. I first noticed something was really wrong when Donald Trump announced his presidency despite having broken all the rules of common decency and morality both in his personal life and in his businesses. His was openly bigoted. He insulted and called his opponents names. He admitted to sexually assaulting women. He lied about everything. He bragged about his wealth and his brains. And he never apologized for anything. For some who wanted the freedom to be bigoted, rude, and obnoxious, he was a breath of fresh air, and they supported him. We later learned that many of his supporters were too embarrassed to publicly admit their support. They didn’t want to be lumped in the “deplorable” category. His winning the election was a blow to our system of rules, mandates, and laws that had been marching toward greater justice and decency.
Another blow to positive progress was when Senator Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. For the sake of Republican political power on the Supreme Court, he broke a longstanding Constitutional mandate that the Senate provide advice and consent for a president’s Supreme Court nominee. Instead, he introduced a new rule that there would be no hearing close to an election. Of course, with an evil smile he later broke his own rule under Trump and provided an advice and consent hearing for a justice even closer to the election than Obama’s nominee. In addition, McConnell changed the longstanding rule that required 60 votes to approve lifetime appointments to federal and supreme court justices. Instead, he lowered it to a simple majority, seizing extraordinary Republican influence on the legal system. And the final blow from McConnell was his refusal to find Trump guilty in his two impeachment trials, despite overwhelming evidence of criminal and moral wrongdoing.
It is fair to say that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell paved the way for the broken rules of common decency in America and opened the door for a slew of immoral laws and ridiculous violations of public health mandates. Under their leadership, the rule of law is in jeopardy.
Mask and vaccine mandates are under fire from people who either believe lies, are deplorable in their selfishness, or a combination of both. Some of these people have died, caused others to die, or have stressed our healthcare systems to the brink of collapse. How is it okay for 2500 people to die every day when we have vaccines and masks to prevent those deaths? It’s scary to think these ill-informed bullies are prolonging a pandemic that causes needless deaths and hurts the economy because Trump and McConnell destroyed the guardrails wherein social pressure once led people to do what was beneficial for the community.
And finally, we continue to watch the over-policing of people of color followed by too many wrongful convictions and longer sentences. The justice system has shown itself to be controlled by politics, given that Trump has been breaking law after law without arrest and prosecution. We are quickly becoming a country absent any accountability for rules, mandates, and laws for the well-placed white male. And as we watch these things erode with each passing day, every day of inaction on the part of the Department of Justice with regard to Trump, emboldens the bullies. One day our communities and our nation will be governed, not by reasonable rules, mandates, and laws for the public good, but by the selfish whims of the uniformed, the violent, and the indecent.