It's a matter of Principle
I watched most of Steven King's Storm of the Century when it came on TV recently. It was of course,
masterful horror, excellent psychological suspense, and the build up brought us to a thrilling dilemma,
pitting principles of moral correctness against the reality of an obviously overwhelming force. In the
end, they did what we have to do every now and then here on earth when things don't match our ideals,
when reality presents us with situations that leave only imperfect options. They made a deal with the
devil. It started me thinking about the part principles play in our lives and how sometimes they don't
work the way they're supposed to... My sister hired a man to build a fence. He was a principled man, and
he built the fence on the principle that the top of the fence should be level and straight. Sounds OK,
right? Only problem is that the terrain is an undulating hillside, and at one point, the fence gets so
low that my sister is worried her horses will step right over it. The man, still entirely convinced of
his principles, continued to insist that he had built the fence properly, and left us to deal with the
problem ourselves... There's some sort of gap here between the straight lines, right angles and clearly
defined truths of the world of principles and the curvy, shifty, multicolored, multifaceted world of
what is. If you are quick to judge, you might point a finger and say "That person is delusional," but
I wouldn't act so fast, because no set of principles works for every set of circumstances, unless you
either have some mechanism for compromise or you start projecting your own ideas of reality onto what
is(and thereby inhabit a delusion). Clearly we must have principles, otherwise chaos would ensue. But what should those principles be,
and how flexible do we have to make them so that they will stay in step with reality? I'll start with a
simple one that we can almost all agree upon (in principle) "Thou shalt not kill." But we kill every day.
We kill all sorts of animals for food, we kill bugs, we kill germs, we kill mice and rats, we kill people
from other countries with expensive bombs, we kill prisoners on death row, we kill each other with our
cars sometimes or with food poisoning or by dropping heavy objects on them, and we kill homeless guys
waving derringers. If you disagree with my use of "we" in that last one, let me point out that we hire
those guys, pay their salaries and buy their equipment with our tax dollars and the many tickets and fines
we pay. I was not there, so I don't know exactly what happened, but I believe that our police officers are
well-equipped and professionally trained and certainly outnumbered a man in a questionable mental state
with a rather pathetic weapon. At some point there was a decision to try, sentence and execute the man,
based upon some perceived threat. Was it an overreaction? They were the ones who were there, dealing with
the split-second actions and the intense insanity of the situation, they were the ones called upon to put
their lives on the line to deal with an unknown situation... The thought that these men posses the authority
to use lethal force based upon such instantaneous decisions is scary to me as a citizen, especially when
their principles are based upon certain definitions of what is proper behavior. I mean, say I was driving
home from my mother's and get stopped for having a tail light out. Say that when I lean to get my insurance
papers from the glove box, the officer sees some bags of dried basil and oregano that my mother had given
me, deems that I am a bad person, assumes I am going for a weapon, rips me out of my truck and gives me a
good roughing up or worse shoots me before I get a chance to explain myself. Mistakes happen... I would at
this point like to mention how amazed I was to taste how much better homegrown spices are than prepackaged
from a store. Wow! Talk about some intense salad dressing!... The republicans were getting all riled up about
principles, or the lack thereof, during the impeachment trial. At first it was the adulterous sort of lack
of principles, but then they looked around and saw that plenty of them had dabbled in that, so they tried
to shift the focus to the lying sort of lack of principles. Turns out ol' Bill's a slippery one and nobody
really knows how, but he got out of it. Partially because the evidence kind of fell apart, but probably
mostly because the American public lives not in the antiseptic world of principles, but in the real world,
the world of flesh and blood, of work and weekends, of love and lust, of pizza buffets, pepsi and cheese in
a pressurized can. A term came up that I liked: Proportionality. It's the idea that the punishment fit the
crime, that we balance our principles with what is practical and reasonable. As with all big things that
happen, the best we can do is to learn from them and try to improve ourselves as a result. Compromise seems
to be a necessary ingredient in any well made agreement. Although to some, this may be a deal with the devil,
I see it more as opening one's eyes to what is really out there rather than judging everything strictly from
a set of values within.
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