WRITTEN RULES TO FOLLOW

Written rules started early for baby boomers.

“Do this, not that, and do it better than you did last time. I’ll write it down so you don’t forget.”

From yard work to school work, to spending time with friends, there were rules.

Ignore the rules and you might be the kid standing in the corner of the cafeteria at lunch.

Who wrote those early rules?

Magna Carta also guaranteed due process of law, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, trial by a jury of peers, and other fundamental rights that inspired and informed the Founding Fathers of our nation when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

 

That’s me with the Magna Carta in the top picture.

It’s a rare picture because of light sensitivity to the document. The conservationists were doing a condition report and needed help from the guard.

I asked about the stains and learned that during an earlier examination one of the experts spilled a cup of tea.

On the Magna Carta.

No tea was spilled during this photo shoot.

 

Written Rules Of Conduct

This could be a picture of a group of Army guys from any era, but they’re my guys from Fort Ord, California in the fall of 1974.

These are the people who signed up to follow a particular set of rules.

 

“I, ____________________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

 

That’s me in the shades, center left.

These many years later I see them through the eyes of age and remember what they meant to me.

We were all in a new environment and they were all new to me.

I’d been separated from the guys I left Portland with to fill in the gaps in other companies and platoons.

Half of the Oregon group marched off to a new company, the other half dispersed through the ranks of the one in Receiving.

I was the last guy pulled out to join the last platoon, a bunch of guys who knew each other like I knew the Oregon guys.

They were strangers when the drill sergeant picked me to lead them.

After that I heard all of their problems, their hopes, their dreams.

One guy was a bus driver from St. Louis who wanted a different life; one guy’s wife was pregnant and he wanted to go over the hill; another guy wanted to kill all the white people.

That last guy was my bunk-mate. He had the top, I had the bottom.

He told me his idea.

I told him about the Army Bunk Rule: you are forbidden to kill your bunkmate.

Brisco and I were buddies after that.

 

Written Oath = Written Rules

This is a group of folks on trial for War Crimes after WWII.

“We were just following orders,” didn’t work as a defense of their actions like they thought.

Not all of them were executed on the gallows.

 

The war crimes trials brought by the Allies, when 37 general officers were sentenced to death and executed, clearly showed this.

 

Once light breaks on dark periods of history, there’s an accounting process.

Who helped, who hindered, and how much?

If our current times gets you thinking about dark days, consider the oath taken by congressmen and congresswomen:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

 

These are the written rules, the spoken rules, America runs on.

 

Time For New Rules?

From NPR:

 

MARTÍNEZ: For a breakdown on how the funding increase might reshape immigration enforcement in the U.S., I called up Daniel Costa. He’s director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank which receives support from major labor unions.

I started by asking him how this money will be spent.

DANIEL COSTA: You get about 30 billion towards ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, which is about triple their current budget.

About 45 billion goes to building immigration detention centers. And that’s up from their current budget of 3.4 billion.

And then you’re going to get almost 47 billion to build the border wall.

MARTÍNEZ: Daniel, you mentioned the 45 billion toward building detention facilities. Are they going out to just contracts for anyone to bid on? Or are they contracts for companies that, say, already have ties to, say, the administration?

COSTA: That money is going to go mainly to two corporations that already run most of the immigrant detention centers, and that’s CoreCivic and the GEO Group. And ICE has already been putting out bids for this work for a number of months in anticipation of getting that money. And some of them are going to be no-bid contracts.

 

The Dinky Birds

When current practices go against written rules why not remind everyone about their oath of service?

As small children in a small town where my Dad was in college we had a house with a fenced backyard.

Like little boys with a new toy, we snuck out the backdoor to pee in the bushes.

After my parents took notice we all visited the local zoo that had two bald eagles.

 

Dad: If you pee outside one of these birds might swoop down and give you a snip. Look at the beak.

Me: Oh. What kind of bird is it?

Dad: A Dinky bird.

Me: It could fly in and get us?

Dad: Not if you go to the bathroom in the toilet.

 

Reading people can better understand written rules.

Read enough and you start making comparisons and contrasts.

No one wants to see anyone punished for following orders, unless those orders violate the oath of service taken and agreed to.

Words have meaning. They still have meaning.