Maybe it was because I’d seen Steve’s post in the morning, but today I had one of those Aha! moments where something that never seemed to make sense suddenly did. And it happened while I was playing Zombie with my grandkids at Homeschool Gym.
In the game, I was a zombie, and I had to catch and ‘zombify’ some of the kids. What I found interesting was that whenever I managed to catch any of them, they would come up with some rule change that nullified the catch.
You weren’t on the blue mat. I was touched by a unicorn, so that cancels out your zombie bite. Biting my left arm doesn’t work, it has to be my right arm. I’m wearing a special suit, or I’m holding this ball, or I’m on the left side of the gym, so I’m zombie-proof.
I kept thinking: This reminds me of something. What is it?
Finally, it hit me: It reminds me of the way we make laws! Whenever something happens that we don’t like, it’s never our fault. It’s never bad luck. It’s never a matter of being out-played, or out-planned, or out-thought by someone else. It’s never a failure on our part. If something didn’t go just the way we thought it should, there must be a problem with the rules. Change the rules, fix the problem.
Does it matter if the new rules contradict other existing rules? Or if they lead to unintended consequences? It doesn’t matter, because the only thing that matters is dealing with the thing that’s making me unhappy right now. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow… we’ll make more rules.
It seems that legislators and judges and governors and presidents and bureaucrats never actually grow out of this attitude. They make up new statutes and rulings and regulations with the same care and forethought as 4- and 6-year-olds changing the rules of Zombie.
In 2003, George W. Bush summarized this perfectly when he said: We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.
By ‘move’, he meant, ‘move the goalposts’. Change the rules.
Apparently a lot of voters never grow out of this attitude either.
All of which explains how people like Sherry Frost, Jan Schmidt, and Wendy Thomas keep getting elected, and why they would think it acceptable to introduce legislation to keep people from using social media to point out the inanity of the words that they speak and write.
I’m on the left side of the House Chamber, so I’m criticism-proof.
You know who did grow out of this attitude? James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, George Washington, and the other people who founded the country. But they still understood its appeal, and its dangers, which is why they created a written constitution — a document whose purpose, in large part, is to make it harder to just make up new rules on the fly.
People who don’t appreciate this often talk about the importance of ‘our democracy’. But a democracy is a government of, by, and for the people. Increasingly, it appears that what we have is a pediocracy — a government of, by, and for the children.
