A few days ago, I was heading to a session and I had to GPS my way to the venue as I didn’t know where it was located. So, my GPS routed me to this very quiet road where there weren’t many cars. There were a few STOP signs on that road and as I was driving, approaching one of the STOP signs I quickly looked around and saw that there were no cars coming and I just drove pass the sign without stopping. What a big mistake as I didn’t realise that the police were in the vicinity and one of the officers stopped me. He asked me why I didn’t stop at the STOP sign and really reprimanded me for endangering the lives of others. I did realise I was very wrong and poured my heart out apologising, as he was about to write a ticket for me, he decided to rather give me a lecture about being more careful and let me go. As I drove, I really felt bad about what I had done and remembered the words a friend once shared when someone was narrating a story to us. Her words were “always obey all laws no matter how foolish you think they seem”.
The background story for the above words goes like this: a group of friends went on a safari and the signs that were all over the animal park were – “don’t go near the lions and don’t feed the lions”. But of course, in this social media selfie and “it didn’t happen if it’s not on social media” world, one of the people in this group wanted to get close to the lions. Maybe at the back of their heads, they reasoned that ‘I’m sure nothing will happen’. The sad turn of events is that when they got close to take a picture next to the lions, the lion attacked and this individual was severely injured. As we were all in shock and feeling sympathetic about the incident – the words “always obey all laws no matter how foolish you think they seem” came.
I was just reflecting that as people we are always quick to complain about how lawless our politicians and police officers are and yet a lot of us in many ways are law breakers. Some of the lawless deeds we commit are: We don’t pay for our vehicle license disks on time; we go over the speed limits and don’t pay for our tickets. We don’t pay for our TV license; we pay people who work for us less than the basic minimum wage as stipulated by the law. Some don’t pay TAX and at work, we “cook-up” information in our reports so that we are seen to be hard workers. The list is endless and if we are truly honest with ourselves we can all find an area where we have broken the law.
Not obeying the law does something to the human heart. We often judge criminals, the reason criminals are criminals is because their conscience has been seared, but it started out small. If you trace the history of most criminals you will realise that their journey to crime started with disobeying small everyday laws and that eventually graduated to disobedience of much bigger laws. The more you get used to breaking these simple everyday laws, the more you will fall into a trap of breaking “bigger” laws as your heart will not see anything wrong.
If you break the normal citizen laws, you will eventually break the law in your career, business and other personal relations – (that’s if you haven’t started already). Let’s not be hypocritical, if we going to hold our political leaders accountable for justice – lets also in our private moments be law abiding.