The Facsimilie Of Liberty

[PrimeRoot]

Im sure this is on the net someplace,
but I forget where.

FIREFIGHT - a tragedy

White from the trench of life
surrender from the losing strife
waves the flag clean in the night;
red flashes in the fire fight,
red glows it there.

The most humble offering, even from the darkest of places, to the righteous is often recognized as valid, sometimes not. But curiously the enforcers of Law are like brass to them all.

The first mention of the word 'morality' often ravages the sensitive heart and induces an urge to retreat. No matter how good I was when I was a kid I always cringed when something went wrong.
I was persuaded, often mistakenly, that even unintentional faults invite fury. On one occasion, I was carrying my mothers floor polisher back to the basement, and to my horror part of it came off. I recall sitting down on the stairs with a desperate panic flooding over me, as I frantically tried to put it back together, and I began to cry. To my surprise my mother came and explained that it was made to come apart and no harm was done. Serious relief.
And on we go, ever feeling out the limits, ever feeling the sting of finding the end of those limits, and ever reluctant to feel that sting again.

In steps the Law. If it were not enough to have your fingers smashed and other embellishments, alas, you finally grow up enough to figure out how to stay out of people's way, and then you look in your rear view mirror... Cops.

Break thee cold into a sweat
surely thy wet end have met
hope flaps on bayonet
no end to the shelling yet
no end but thine?

If it was black and white surely the roughest would be over. But faithfully the red and blue come on, and faithfully you stop your vehicle, wondering if you stopped right, and rolling down the window furtively lest you should rather have kept your hands on the steering wheel. So it goes, racing your mind "Do you have a light burned out" , or "Did you unknowingly miss a school zone"... only to look up and see the Law man turn the corner a block behind you.

But all this is not the whole reason for the Law. The reason for black and white. What ever the situation we can rest assured that if we are charged with speeding it is for a good reason most times. If we get our fingers whacked we often deserved it. Or if we bear the cost of another person's crime perhaps there is a lesson in it for us.
The focus shifts to WHO is guilty, and away from the guilt. In the failure to effectively impersonalize justice we focus on the act of getting caught, and fairness is given a toe hold. The rights of the accused become a factor and soon the black and white becomes grey.
True Law is not oriented around the guilty, nor the even the crime. And it DOES at times become incumbent upon those who enforce it to cause innocents to suffer penalty for crimes not committed.

Democracies hail the art of representation. The wee people speak as one, the shards amass and focus into one. The capital of the nation blazes with the demands of the people, and oozing back through the scorched filter seeps the will of many, the Laws of the day.

A flag so white yet so red
Unseen stripes of the dead
Signals advancement overhead
Battle fury pent up instead;
release the fury

So the Law is from the people, and commanded upon the people for the people's benefit. Not quite. The colonists brought with them more than seed wheat and long underwear. They also brought and established an order. They brought the Law.

Of course it is not fair to say that the Law stands unchanged. And that is where this is turning rank. It is believed that the people rule. It is believed that a power higher than the Law exists, that can change the Law, that is served by the Law. Nothing is farther from the truth.
For in as much as the Law is not oriented around the guilty nor the crime, neither does it serve nor is it possessed by any man. It is as immutable as Gravity, as immune as Mathematics, because the commands originate from God the creator of all these: man included. His Law is holy, serving only His own purposes, not the perversity of our red meat world.
The victim of crime, the crime, and the criminal, AND those civilians in no way involved in crime -- all equally part of the nativity of the Law, but a humbly miniscule part. We have exalted all the opposite. We forget the Word Who gave the Law, and in our self focus we ignore the absolute sovereignty of the Law giver. Spending our days instead justifying new deviations that seem satisfactory to the many.

Feeding on the result of this scarcely disguised rebellion is the collapse of every good thing which has been entrusted into the hands of the rebels. As those gifts are consumed upon our desires, so too will progressively more innocents suffer, more of nature will cry out for the end, more buds form on the fig tree of Matthew 24.

Great was the peoples might
Trampled long into the night
Put old standards to flight
lay down now in thy fright
many fearsome frights

(c) Uriah 1996
Posted with first-hand permission.