If we lived in a world where there were no restrictions, the greediest and the wisest would surely be the richest and most powerful. The most helpful and the purest (the "good" people) would be the most abused and overused. Chaos and bloodbath everywhere, until finally, every single living being is annihilated.
This is exactly why we have laws; why since the dawn of time, we had to have a leader...someone to lay down and enforce the laws, punish the violators, cut off excesses, someone to follow. Those leaders turned out to be the wisest, the most cunning. Laying down laws that they themselves don't want to follow and more often than not, they don't. They don't follow because they are exempted. Exceptions. Because they are above the law. Because they are the law.
Leaders in the present are no different, only this time, things are more complicated. Witty lawyers, mercenary judges, international media, incredible technology and the condemning masses are involved. And they aren't called leaders nowadays -probably because they hardly lead anymore, they have people beneath them (like policemen, teachers and priests) hopefully doing that arduous task- they're now called politicians. They can no longer say that they're exempted from the law. Instead, they have lawyers for that. Forget exceptions, there's a subtler word for that now: loopholes.
Loopholes are made along with the laws by leaders with their own selves in mind, I guess they were thinking "just in case I..." and it's all downhill from then on. The leaders may be the most cunning, but there are also the other types of cunning: the less cunning and the not cunning at all.
Before cunningness and everything else, I wanna talk about God first. Or Allah, Bathala or Zeus or whatever other people call Him/Her/It.
It's hard not to compare God to the leaders...what with all the reverence they expect from everyone and laying down laws, just plain acting god themselves.
I'm a Roman Catholic so I'll be using God as my base.
They say God created EVERYTHING. The birds and the bees, lightning and thunder, flowers and trees, man and woman, angels and demons, good and evil, illnesses and diseases, the world, the universe...everything. God even created the Ten Commandments.
"Thou shalt not kill" is the most popular one. If God created everything, then wouldn't He have subsequently killed all those struck by lightning? All those stung by bees to death? Maybe those people who died of "natural causes" violated a commandment that nobody else knows of, except for God Himself since He knows everything, so He punished them. Wouldn't that be killing too? So who's going to punish Him? No one's above Him. And besides, He's the one who created the commandments, so maybe He's above them too.
Makes me wonder how the authors of the Good Book would defend this arguement. Would He be exempted from the commandments, what loopholes would they use if He's not?
Or maybe the big bang theory is true. Whatever the case may be, my point is, rules or laws or commandments have a way of blowing up in their makers' faces; so they make exceptions and/or loopholes. It would all depend on just how cunning you are; in making those laws, and in talking your way out if you ever get caught in violating them.
"Thou shalt not kill" is in every nation's list of long laws, just in different forms...but it is there, because really, who wants to be murdered? In some countries, it is ironically punishable by death. What kind of logic is that? Who's going to punish the punisher, since he too is a killer? Wouldn't the author of that law be indirectly responsible for the deaths of those killers too? No, there are exceptions of course.
Several degrees of murder, manslaughter, homicide... How twisted can one's mind get? A life lost, is a life lost PERIOD. It shouldn't matter if it was intentional or not. It shouldn't matter how painful or painless one's life had been abruptly cut short. Because no matter what you call it, no matter what degree you rate it, it doesn't change the fact that a life has been lost. But in reality, in the utterly gruesome reality we live in, one can in fact walk away from such thing. We've all seen it, heard of it, time and time again. It's all about loopholes. It's all about surrounding yourself with the most cunning people you can afford to defend your less cunning self and make the dead in question not cunning at all...because he's so stupid, he's dead.
If one can walk away from murder, how easy it must be for "lesser" crimes.
