Today’s people believe themselves unique from all others, and entitled to special consideration in honor of that fact. Yes, it is a fact that you are a totally unique person – JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE. This uniqueness is both unremarkable and ubiquitous – that means it is universal, and something that is universal certainly doesn’t make you unusual, or deserving of special considerations for being exactly like everybody else.
Rules (and laws, for that matter) come about because somebody caused a problem, a serious problem, and the rule or law was established to prevent someone else from causing the same issue – in other words, somebody screwed up and now everybody else has a rule/law, including those who didn’t need it because they’d never do it, anyway. Like murder, for example. It’s against the law to kill another person. DUH. Despite it being against the law, with specified serious consequences up to and including we (as a society) will KILL YOU BACK – apparently, that potential consequence doesn’t stop a whole lot of people from doing it anyway.
And this, for something so serious that it could very likely end up terminating your unique existence on this planet – they do it anyway.
Now, imagine this mindset, the murderer’s mindset, applied to all the many smaller rules and laws that exist to keep order in a society: I’m going to do it anyway because this broken rule/law won’t (usually) kill me. This is the recipe for chaos in society, and friend – we are THERE.
The evidence is there to show we have arrived. A quick Google search supplies the frightening fact that people KNOW that texting while driving, which BTW, is illegal nearly everywhere, can kill (and does kill, on average, about 11 people a day) and yet 35-45% of people DO IT ANYWAY. More than 15 of every hundred adults (37.8 million) in the USA is a smoker, KNOWING it can and does kill. The list of irresponsible, life-threatening risk-taking continues in like vein for many, many behaviors, for many, many thousands of people.
This doesn’t include the little stuff that is designed to make a workplace, a home, a school an orderly place to function. If people are so contemptuous of the stuff that can and does KILL people, I suppose it is entirely within character for them to frequently, usually and completely ignore all the others, too. I can only assume this is because, as a totally unique individual, I am therefore cosmically exempt from all strictures and consequences. hahahahahahahahaaha, yeah, right.
There is such a thing as mercy. God offers it in the act of salvation, and occasionally, He suspends His usual laws of the universe and miraculously bails out someone from the natural consequences of their own actions – or circumstances beyond their control. It happens too often to be just chance. Occasionally, and more and more frequently in this modern age, judges and other administrators dispense mercy to individuals who also don’t deserve it. That WOULD BE the definition of mercy: salvation, or grace extended to the undeserving.
COUNTING on mercy to absolve you when you deliberately flout rules and laws is stretching it. Very few escape justice (man’s or the cosmic variety) forever in this life, and no one escapes it in the next.
Dirtdaubber Wasp 