I am 58 years old and the one thing I can tell you for certain is that most people aren't really all that nice while very much wanting to FEEL like they are "good people." We often use very simple rubrics for trying to claim we are virtuous and one of those rubrics is legality.
Laws are not inherently MORAL. They are frequently filled with human bias, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes very much intentionally and with malice aforethought, such as post-Civil War Jim Crow laws in the USA designed to deny rights to newly freed Black slaves, such as the right to vote.
The Grandfather Clause was a law designed to deny Blacks the right to vote based on poverty and illiteracy while providing a loophole for poor, illiterate Whites: If your grandfather qualified for the right to vote, so did you, though you couldn't read or write. And no Black American at that time had a grandfather who qualified because all their grandfathers were slaves.
Political activists frequently break laws and get arrested trying to fight against things that they feel are worse than them being arrested. For political activists, a long track record of arrests can be a form of "bragging rights," as with the respected actor and political activist Martin Sheen:
I'm a blogger. I tell stories. I try to cast light on ugly truths so ugly no one wants to admit they really exist.
Like Martin Sheen, I don't WANT political office. At the moment, being a politician is a deal with the devil that allows the entire world to look up your skirts and accuse you of wrongdoing for no real reason.
Both our previous President -- Trump -- and our current one -- Biden -- have been or are being investigated for impeachment. I'm not sure they are really worse presidents than past presidents but in the past the Secret Service helped cover up presidential affairs to not "embarass" the office, among other things.
Historically, a lot of things were handled more locally and a lot of things were de facto OVERLOOKED and not talked about and often no one wrote anything down about it. We think we know more about history than we really do and we currently expect a level of perfection NO ONE can meet.
I've had personal friction for a lot of years with a Dutchman named Jacques Mattheij whom I know through a public forum, Hacker News. I have long protected him not because he wasn't a pain in my ass but because I felt absolutely certain he was my only hope of ever getting a fair shake and if I bitched too openly about what an aggravation he was, the result would be that HE would get hurt and my life would get WORSE, not better.
His only "crime" is having a crush on a woman in his social circle and NOT wanting the world to know it. My only crime is having turned the head of a powerful man...nay, it's worse than that. My REAL crime is being a woman AT ALL while participating in a social group that was 98 percent male when I joined it.
If it hadn't been HIM, it would have been SOMEONE ELSE who wanted me and was a headache for me and they would most likely NOT have been the idealist he is and not had the practical political knowledge that grows out of the Netherlands reclaiming much of its land from the sea, creating land called polders. "Polder politics" means that historically warring cities sometimes had to COOPERATE against a bigger enemy: The sea threatening to drown them BOTH.
People are quick to scream "Off with his head!" and after some scapegoat has been named and blamed, nothing really changes and all too often the person punished and eliminated was actually the one person doing something useful at all and now things are worse but there is no one left to blame.
I apologize for talking about you and using you as EXAMPLES in my writing and potentially making you targets of assholes who would like to find someone to "punish" for some imagined offense because someone hurt them once having nothing to do with you and they want to feel like "good people" and would rather look good than do good because doing good is always really hard and often does not make you look good in the short run.
I've tried for years to figure out how to write effectively about social things, which I find endlessly interesting. Talking about me makes everyone accuse me of being a narcissist and inspires weirdos to obsess about me and stalk me and feel like they have a SPECIAL relationship to me. Talking about others is interpreted as an attack upon them no matter how carefully I try to speak. Talking in generalities fails to make a point at all.
The world is really, really a mess right now and we may ALL DIE if we don't pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and DO SOMETHNG about it and what I know how to do is WRITE.
It's what my defective body ALLOWS me to reliably do, though I often wish very much I could be doing SOMETHING ELSE instead because talking to 8 billion people seems like a fool's errand that cannot possibly go anywhere good, what with at least 7.5 billion people being eager to jump on a thing and run off half cocked while I am still sorting my thoughts and trying to do analysis and publishing the writing I have NOW is part of the process of sorting my thoughts.
OOPS.
Laws are not inherently MORAL. They are frequently filled with human bias, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes very much intentionally and with malice aforethought, such as post-Civil War Jim Crow laws in the USA designed to deny rights to newly freed Black slaves, such as the right to vote.
The Grandfather Clause was a law designed to deny Blacks the right to vote based on poverty and illiteracy while providing a loophole for poor, illiterate Whites: If your grandfather qualified for the right to vote, so did you, though you couldn't read or write. And no Black American at that time had a grandfather who qualified because all their grandfathers were slaves.
Political activists frequently break laws and get arrested trying to fight against things that they feel are worse than them being arrested. For political activists, a long track record of arrests can be a form of "bragging rights," as with the respected actor and political activist Martin Sheen:
In a speech at Oxford University in 2009, Sheen stated that he had been arrested 66 times for protesting and acts of civil disobedience. He was described by human rights activist Craig Kielburger as having "a rap sheet almost as long as his list of film credits."My father was very big on doing the right thing, even if it meant breaking a few rules. He retired from the military when I was three years old and I spent my childhood listening to tales of his escapades and some of the ways he broke rules to get things done and do right by people, sometimes in ways that could have gotten him thrown in jail had he been caught.
Soon, the bathroom was all fixed up. No one in the unit said one word about him breaking a bunch of rules to do right by them.I've lived a very private life and this has allowed me to at times do things quietly -- because there were no eyes on me -- that might have led to serious public drama had my life been more public.
I'm a blogger. I tell stories. I try to cast light on ugly truths so ugly no one wants to admit they really exist.
Like Martin Sheen, I don't WANT political office. At the moment, being a politician is a deal with the devil that allows the entire world to look up your skirts and accuse you of wrongdoing for no real reason.
Both our previous President -- Trump -- and our current one -- Biden -- have been or are being investigated for impeachment. I'm not sure they are really worse presidents than past presidents but in the past the Secret Service helped cover up presidential affairs to not "embarass" the office, among other things.
Historically, a lot of things were handled more locally and a lot of things were de facto OVERLOOKED and not talked about and often no one wrote anything down about it. We think we know more about history than we really do and we currently expect a level of perfection NO ONE can meet.
I've had personal friction for a lot of years with a Dutchman named Jacques Mattheij whom I know through a public forum, Hacker News. I have long protected him not because he wasn't a pain in my ass but because I felt absolutely certain he was my only hope of ever getting a fair shake and if I bitched too openly about what an aggravation he was, the result would be that HE would get hurt and my life would get WORSE, not better.
His only "crime" is having a crush on a woman in his social circle and NOT wanting the world to know it. My only crime is having turned the head of a powerful man...nay, it's worse than that. My REAL crime is being a woman AT ALL while participating in a social group that was 98 percent male when I joined it.
If it hadn't been HIM, it would have been SOMEONE ELSE who wanted me and was a headache for me and they would most likely NOT have been the idealist he is and not had the practical political knowledge that grows out of the Netherlands reclaiming much of its land from the sea, creating land called polders. "Polder politics" means that historically warring cities sometimes had to COOPERATE against a bigger enemy: The sea threatening to drown them BOTH.
People are quick to scream "Off with his head!" and after some scapegoat has been named and blamed, nothing really changes and all too often the person punished and eliminated was actually the one person doing something useful at all and now things are worse but there is no one left to blame.
"...but even if you can find a place to assign the blame, it doesn't make the problems go away."
I apologize for talking about you and using you as EXAMPLES in my writing and potentially making you targets of assholes who would like to find someone to "punish" for some imagined offense because someone hurt them once having nothing to do with you and they want to feel like "good people" and would rather look good than do good because doing good is always really hard and often does not make you look good in the short run.
I've tried for years to figure out how to write effectively about social things, which I find endlessly interesting. Talking about me makes everyone accuse me of being a narcissist and inspires weirdos to obsess about me and stalk me and feel like they have a SPECIAL relationship to me. Talking about others is interpreted as an attack upon them no matter how carefully I try to speak. Talking in generalities fails to make a point at all.
The world is really, really a mess right now and we may ALL DIE if we don't pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and DO SOMETHNG about it and what I know how to do is WRITE.
It's what my defective body ALLOWS me to reliably do, though I often wish very much I could be doing SOMETHING ELSE instead because talking to 8 billion people seems like a fool's errand that cannot possibly go anywhere good, what with at least 7.5 billion people being eager to jump on a thing and run off half cocked while I am still sorting my thoughts and trying to do analysis and publishing the writing I have NOW is part of the process of sorting my thoughts.
OOPS.