You never really appreciate how much the individual parts of your body do for you until one of them is working overtime to either make you work or recover. I am far too aware of my nose and the fact that it is trying to process and adjust everything here and I am left stumbling around barely able to move or think.

And in the middle of the night, one of my friends got up and started translating all the portugese on the bottles of cold medicine to see if we could find something to help me sleep. And we did, thank god.

And I got up, went outside with my coffee and seagulls were flying overhead crying.

How do you decide when a law or rule is so ridiculous, or just wrong that it is appropriate to ignore or break it? Like with Ling and Lee and the laws of a dictatorship, or even in America with all its various laws that promote discrimination and are not placed in a position to be challenged until enough people choose to willfully break it – how do you decide to break a law?

And what is the difference between choosing to break a law because it is unjust and choosing to break a law because you just simply want something (like stealing a car)? While the answer to that may seem easy, one is unjust and one is not, who’s morals are we using to judge the just/unjust properties of a law.

The difficulty with law is that it must somehow bridge several different sets of cultural morals. Ideally, the larger culture or community has an “umbrella” set of morals to provide for governing but there will always be a point at which either the law offends or, the law was created through a political push of a minority.

But what right do we have to decide that a certain law is “not for us?’

It is a very thin line between being revolutionary and being a criminal.
Yet, as most of us know, working to change something from within its existing structure is not very effective at all. Yet trying to change something from completely outside of its structure creates such a conflict that things can quickly become either/or.

In the house where I am staying there is an enormous cat named “DoDo”. He was rescued and has never quite adapted. He must weigh 30 pounds and is the size of a small pig. He will only let you pet him if you sit in a certain chair. Who is sitting in the chair does not matter to him but that you are sitting in the “petting chair.”

Oddly enough, he let’s the mad kitten roam around at will except for in the living room, which he protects as his own. One of my jobs while I am staying here is to try and make DoDo more…normal.

Anyway…there are no easy answers in all this, the only point that is hard and fast is that you cannot willfully choose to break a law without having a clear understanding of your own moral code. To break a law without a moral code makes one a criminal and deviant. To choose to break a law because of its injustice as defined by your moral code can make you revolutionary or simply misguided, but it gives to your actions a framework that can be understood, fought or supported.

But the caveat is that in clearly understanding your moral code and choosing to break a law because of it means you also have the understanding that you are performing a criminal act and bear the responsibility for the punishment for it. You moral code, your ethics demand that not obeying this injust law is worth the suffering because you will suffer with the freedom of consciousness and choice. Your choice may reveal the law for what it is and create change. Your choice may also change nothing (except the freedom of your circumstances).

It is one of the reasons that riots et al rarely change anything. Riots tend to emerge as emotional waves in response to something, a simple cry of “it’s wrong” but with no balance of understanding of “what is right” to temper the action.

But…I would say, randomly choosing to break laws as a “statement” doesn’t work because it sets you up as an enemy of the people, of comfort and normalacy. Laws are a lot like…beer. In the right hands they do little harm, but in the wrong ones they become a symptom of a much more insidious disease, the way that an alcoholic drinks beer to mask what is driving that kind of escapist behavior, sometimes we become obsessed with what our laws do or do not do as an avoidance tactic to not see what the real depth of the problem is. Remember, a law is black and white, it is created to try and impose surety and expectation and that is not really how life goes and that is why laws are continuously challenged.

Where the hell did all this come from? Oy, portuge cough syrup…

New Performance Video!  Requiem for a God what is that little flower? copyright 2000-2009 Cassandra Tribe. All rights reserved. For permission to use any of this material please contact info@loveandwords.com

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