Grandpa, Law, Order
And Stealing Books
Introduction
My maternal grandfather was the smartest person I’ve ever met. He possessed a once in a generation intelligence. He was gifted at demonstrating the functional purpose for information. All of his lessons had a beginning, middle, and end, and they weren’t over until you got to the punchline. Most people were too impatient to wait until the lessons came full circle, but my brothers and I had no choice, we had to wait until the reveal.
I’m now finding they were always worth it, I didn’t always appreciate them growing up.
Even now when I think back on our conversations I pull new insights from our chats.
Frank, not his government name, but a name he used so much he would have had to have classified it as an ‘also known as’, could wax philosophical on just about anything. War, politics, history, philosophy, music, international relations, grammar, literature, and film. I’ve not met a more well read human. I credit my thinking to Frank’s influence. I learned facts in school, but I learned critical thinking from Grandpa.
An Important Lesson
One of the lessons Grandpa taught me had to do with law, justice, and order. Grandpa was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1937, he grew up during Jim Crow. Jim Crow used skin color to restrict access to everything from water fountains to building entrances. Black Americans were not permitted access to all sorts of public resources, it was the age of segregation.
Did you know the public library in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was one of those White only resources? My Grandpa, for all of his intelligence, was not allowed to use the library. He could not legally access what I consider to be a national treasure. Lawmakers drafted bills that kept him out of the library, from their perspective and many others, this was orderly.
Law and Order
Do you know what my Grandpa did? He stole books. He resorted to thievery to quench his thirst for knowledge. Technically, this was illegal, and therefore it was disorderly. If he was ever caught any court ordered punishment would have absolutely been ‘appropriate’.
Why This Matters Today
I hear this phrase ‘Law and Order’ often, maybe too often? I’m a big ‘Law and Order’ fan (not the show, anymore ; )), when it comes to operating automobiles. I’m less of a fan if there are laws imposing an order that marginalizes something I care about. I bet you are too. My point is, it’s subjective, and it goes beyond voting.
Let the system worry about law and order, and let us nurture honor and justice. So how do we do that? One way is empathy.
Consider this statement please, law and order is another way to say ‘I like things the way they are’. Do you agree?
If you like things the way they are right now there’s nothing wrong with that, at all. But imagine, the way you want things to be is threatened by a system that disagrees with you. Is that scary? There are people who don’t like the way things are right now, at some point in time, we’ll all be there…
The Takeaway
When we like things the way they are, let’s be sure to contemplate how it must feel to want the opposite. We can explore our feelings from that thought exercise to investigate our impressions of what honor and justice might look like for us in those situations.
Then we should go out and honor others and treat them justly, we don’t need laws for that.
How can you try this out today?
That's definitely true. It makes me wonder, as we age, do we collect flaws? Or, do we just lose our veneer?
But to your point, Grandpas, Grandmas definitely get the halo effect, if we're lucky. I wonder when that starts to fade?
When we’re young we think our grandpas are super heroes-- that they could do anything. When we grow up, if we’re lucky, we realize that was 100% the case.