There Are Rules

 

It’s December and still no snow. Mt Bachelor is getting antsy, I imagine, but these beautiful, clear days, with highs in the 50s (and a few times 60s!) are letting me enjoy midday walks with my dogs that my former work schedule prohibited. Nearby trails and neighborhoods, their foliage and front porch decorations changing with the seasons, provide our usual routes, but today after errands we stopped at the Skyline Sports Complex where my boys could run on the deserted fields while I made my way twice around the paved perimeter. Except for the group of children on the far east playing field (7 – 8-year-olds, I would guess; probably Seven Peaks students), we were the only ones there.

The children were engaged in a game of kickball, and, as I entered the park, their piping voices carried clearly to me:

Piping Voice 1: Hey! You went to the wrong base!

Piping Voice 2: I can choose my own base!

Piping Voice 1: No you can’t! There are ruuuules!!

I mean, yeah. There are rules. But, like, so what? I had just come from the Safeway where, in spite of the sign posted on the door–Face masks required in this store–there were maskless shoppers plowing through apple piles, reaching for pasta sauce, chatting in the wine aisle. Last January, people unhappy with presidential election results pushed down barricades, battered police officers, and broke into the nation’s Capitol building, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Did they not know the rules? And what about the seventeen-year-old who used a gun the rules said he should not have to kill two unarmed people he believed were a threat and is now not only exonerated, but lauded by elected government officials for acting heroically.

Look, I break rules too. The leash law, for instance, says my dogs should not have been running freely at the park today. But because they are responsive to my voice commands and because no one else was there, I calculated a risk-benefit and acted accordingly–putting no one in any danger. It just seems to me that many people–more and more people–are choosing to break rules without regard to anyone or anything except their own convenience and desires. And that scares me.

How will the six-year-old who sees her parents defy rules, break laws, disparage elected leaders and mock medical professionals respond to her teacher’s directives? Why should a 12-year-old who has watched our president encourage physical violence refrain from using his fists to solve a dispute? Children don’t learn how to act the way they learn how to read or write; they absorb cultural norms and expectations. When posted regulations or laws are ignored, when a teenaged vigilante is honored with an Appreciation Rally, when adults routinely break rules that were made to keep the citizens of our country safe and strong, how do we expect our children to behave? Is the line from Kyle Rittenhouse to Ethan Crumbley so hard to see?

Maybe I’m getting a little Andy Rooney here, but I’m not just crabbing about something like those gawd-awful molded plastic packages (blister packs?), although somebody should, I am genuinely afraid for the future of our country. If we can’t trust each other to follow basic rules, to be responsible citizens, to care about each other, how can Democracy survive? When you choose your own base, we can’t have a game. Somebody call the ump.