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Commentary

A TV show that I always enjoyed watching was “Law and Order.” My oldest daughter, who happens to be a lawyer in California, said one day that the show tends to run fairly true to actual court activities, at least more than many others.

For those who may not be familiar with the show, it presents various murder cases encountered by the law. One feature of the law that would seem to me to be ripe for re-evaluation would be the fact that the defensive attorneys can keep their murderer out of a prison sentence if they can find a way to show that the defendant was at least temporarily out of his mind at the time he committed the murder. An insanity plea lifts the defendant to be more free of blame than being convicted of out and out murder.

I would suggest that when one person kills another for any reason other than as a soldier in battle, or in self defense of oneself, or one’s family, he is not in his right mind. It is irrational to kill someone just because they have what you want, or act in a way that may frustrate your goals or sense of pride etc., etc., etc.

War itself is irrational. It is a custom that comes from antiquity, when mankind lived in competition with the beasts, and thereby lived by the sword, before the dawn of reason.

Today we have had the dawn of reason, but we have yet to reach the full bloom of noonday in the world of understanding, reason and sanity. We may never reach a point where there is no insanity, but we may reach a point where it will become sparse enough to be easily controllable.

Our education systems are the pathways to success. Too often they become the fertile gardens of would-be creators of a new world, fashioned after the ideals of some do-gooders, whose dreams haven’t been adequately exposed to many of the realities we face. Our solution, however, does not lie in getting everyone to think and act the same, but rather to encourage everyone to learn to make up their own mind and follow their own star. This is actually a faith in the inborn ability of our intelligence, and the realization that we must wrestle with life, and ourselves, and our ignorant tendencies to come to appreciate the truth of our lives. That’s what we have been given a lifetime to achieve.

Murderers, and other major obstructionists, should be taken as examples of incomplete humanity. It is beyond my understanding as to what kind of treatment they should have, or how to bring them up to speed to become complete persons, but the same is true of the thief, the rapist, the child molester, or whatever.

Isn’t it a keystone of Christianity that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto ourselves? What I am suggesting, is that our lives and the life of humanity in general, lies not in our political systems, nearly as much as it depends on our respect for one another, and our willingness to deal fairly with one another.

I am not familiar with the principles of the other religions in the world, but I seem to have heard that the Golden Rule is not uncommon in any of them. If we could champion this rule, and make it as popular as we have made Political Correctness popular, we would solve many more of society’s problems than PC has solved, and many that PC has created.

As our world, through the development of transportation and communication grows smaller and smaller every day, and our various civilizations grow more intimate everyday, it becomes apparent that we must learn to recognize a common denominator that will allow humanity to live in peace without domination from one to the next. Only by allowing various systems to work out their varying principles, may we ever reach a point of a commonality in the rationality of the human mind, where we can live in peace with one another, without simply bombing our enemies into oblivion. May God bless America.

Richard Westlund is a Collins resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com

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