Lawless

There has been a lot of news about laws, thanks to one individual who seems to break another law every time he opens his mouth. It got me thinking about how our lives are controlled by laws. Not just laws created by our elected bodies, which obviously don’t apply to members of those esteemed bodies, but also laws that are just there in nature. Example, if I break the law of gravity will I be indicted? I doubt it. If I could break that law, I would just fly away. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to accomplish that yet, gravity always wins. I can confirm that with a hospital stay I had a few years ago. When I fell off my bike, I went down no matter how much I wanted to go up. People are constantly trying to defy the law of gravity, but fail. I just saw an article that the Grand Canyon has the most deaths of all the National Parks. Mostly due to the fact that the only direction you can go when you get too close to the edge of the canyon is down, way down. The law of gravity is our downfall. See what I did there. I kill myself.

Our lives are governed by many of these scientific laws. I am sure that everyone has heard the saying, “Every action has an opposite and equal reaction.”

I think that may be Newton’s first law of motion, but I’m not quite sure. I have unquestioned proof that this law is not true. I was driving down the freeway the other day when some guy cut me off. Like almost every driver out here, I responded with a one finger wave. Harmless right? The other driver’s reaction to my action was not equal as he pulled out a gun and started waving it in my direction. I think Newton should stick to making fig cookies.

There is a law that never fails to deliver, Murphy’s Law. I have no idea how an Irishman could get a law named after him, but the guy must have been extremely unlucky. The law is, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Admit it, we have all experienced this. It usually starts with a project at work or home, you think you have everything planned out and you’re prepared for whatever comes to us and BANG, something weird occurs. 

I think where this happens the most is at a big wedding celebration. Imagine you have your wedding planned on a beautiful beach in Hawaii. Everyone is nicely dressed and even Aunt Hilda made it in her wheelchair. Suddenly a freak tsunami strikes one beach in Hawaii and it happens to be yours. Everything is wiped out. All the guests are soaked to the bone and Aunt Hilda is stranded, still in her wheelchair, in the top of a palm tree. Your wedding cake was last seen in the shipping lanes on its way to Japan. If for some crazy reason your wedding party got a heads up that a tsunami was heading your way and you relocated your wedding party to higher ground, inland and indoors, an earthquake would hit the building and collapse it and leave Aunt Hilda and her wheelchair  stranded on the top of the pile of rubble. Everyone has quoted Murphy’s Law. I know that law can’t be wrong.

I have claimed one law to be my own. I call it “B.B.’s law.” If it doesn’t fit, force it, if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. This is the law for every handyman out there who refuses to pay an expert to fix a problem with their house or car. These are the kind of folks duct tape was invented for. When I work on a project and am looking for something that will repair the issue I have, instead of going to the local hardware store, I start searching through the piles of things I have saved because, “this will come in handy one day.”

My “forced” part will work, at least for a short time, as long as I use enough duct tape. My repair will eventually fail because that’s the law. So after a while when I finally realize we do need the water flowing in our house, I will eventually cave and call in an expert to correct my fix. The repair person will charge me twice as much to fix it because of the extra damage I did with my repair. 

Then there is the “law of averages.” You usually hear this from gamblers. The theory is that if you do the same thing over and over, eventually it will work in your favor. Let’s say you keep betting on the number “22” on a roulette table, according to the law of averages, that number will eventually hit. According to my tireless research on Wikipedia, that’s just not so. There is no force in the universe that will change your luck, it is all random. Maybe you’ll realize that when you are hitchhiking back from Vegas because you bought into that hype and sold everything to test the “law of averages.” Maybe that Newton guy came up with this silly law too. Still, his cookies aren’t so bad.

Then there is the “law of the jungle.” This phrase comes from “The Jungle Book,” by Rudyard Kipling. In the book, it is an actual law followed by the animals in the jungle. It has come to be known as the survival of the fittest. It is used for situations in the business world, sports world, education, war zones and any place where there is competition to succeed. It also has come to represent that anyone can act like an animal in trying to achieve their goal, no matter who gets hurt along the way. Politics…need I say more?

I consider myself a law breaker. I forget to use my turn signal once in a while. I will not give an opposite and equal reaction to someone’s rude action towards me and I’ll be taking on the law of averages later when I get on my bike and try not to end up in the hospital again. My wife is looking at me and letting me know, she’s the sheriff around here and I won’t be trying to break any laws today.

©2023 BBRiley.net