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Sunday, August 30, 2020

LAW and ORDER ≠ PEACE AND QUIET

 Trump campaign: 

“WE will make America Great Again.”  Hmmm?  That must mean that you failed at your first attempt so that now you have to start all over again.  Why are you waiting to start, again?  So now the rallying cry is, “LAW & ORDER”   I have a thought or two about that.

My first thought is:  "We Americans are deeply devoted to the culture of "Fair play."  "Fair play" is virtuous behavior built on mutual trust that asures that all concerned, winners as well as losers will profit from the exercise and be able to walk away from it with head held high.  This is our culture and it informs the entirety of our life.  In the culture of  "Fair play", the participants themselves work on the outcome.  They do so according to the laws that regulate the exercise of the effort.  They submit their efforts to the arbiters who are presumed to be neutral and fair.  This is our way of life.  We win some, we lose some.  The winners and the losers congratulate one another and in the space of time between "set-to's" they are at peace with one another.  The virtues of peace and justice are the way of life.

Law and Order are not driving, personal principles.  They are commands that are laid before the populace by an authority and compliance is not aimed at developing virtuous behavior.  The goal is to provide satisfaction to the authority so that communitarian problems don't cause unrest.  The goal of Law and Order" is to stifle the behavior of the community to the point where the authority doesn't get bothered by the need to solve community problems that are deemed to be outside of said authority's expectations.  

Behavior in a Law and Order regime is not rooted in the canon of universal or local laws and decrees.  Behavior in a Law and Order system is only rooted in the expectations of the authority.  The community's behavior in a Law and Order environment is not expected to make the members of  the community more virtuous.  It is only rewarded by the lack of punishment that subservience assures.

It is to be noted that the driving authority is not held by a personal conscience to be a shining example of the Law an Order behavior that is required of the citizenry.  A Law and Order authority is under absolutely no personal exigency to provide the subjects in this regime with an example of ideal behavior.

Furthermore, it is to be understood that the authority will not offer any creative solutions that may be called for in the wake of disastrous turn of events of any nature.  Since the authority is the enforcer of behavior, the citizenry will be expected to solve any and all problems.  The only feedback that will be given is the remark that the solution shows how ignorant the hard working people really are. 

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