Rules, Laws and Habits

I have just returned from a trip via airplane to visit my mother and other members of my family in Oklahoma. Since I did not have a direct flight either on the trip out or the return trip, I had a lot of time to engage in one of my favorite past times which is observing the behavior of we humans. 

In the Dallas airport, for instance, there was a young boy playing with his toy airplane.   It seemed as if he could not go 2 minutes without breaking some rule.  The rules were very practical and included:

·      Do not crawl on the dirty airport carpet which cold host a variety of germs.

·      Do not allow the wings of the plane to get too close to other people so that you do not scratch them.

·      Hold mommy or daddy hand when going some place.

·      Stay close to mommy and daddy.

·      You may not have another piece of candy.

Although these rules may have seemed arbitrary to the young child, they were not.  They were pretty universally accepted rules for those families who spend time in public places such as airports and who still want to monitor the nutritional intake and general behavior of their children.   If a child is lucky he or she has parents who are able to be emotionally and physically present enough to provide a lot of guidance for the developmental years of their life.  Although the nature of the guidance will change as the children become teenagers and approach the age of legal adulthood, the hands on guidance will still be very important.

I started thinking about the fact that in addition to these very practical rules every family and cultural groups has a lot of expectations, which, in some families, will become rules.  Some of these rules may be grounded in the religious or cultural heritage of the family.  There are often rules covering a wide range of behaviors. These may include:

·      Eat everything on your plate.

·      Do not complain about what food you have. There are starving children in China. (I would have been happy to share some of my food with the children in China).

·      Address all adults my Mrs. or Sir.

·      Children do not speak when adults are present unless spoken to.

·      Do not use words such as dam or “take the lord’s name in vain” – applied to children but not adults.

·      Do not embarrass your parents by misbehaving or by crying in front of anyone outside of the family even if you have been beaten.

·      Take care of your elders even if you do not like them.

·      If one family member is angry with another family member do not speak or do anything for that family member who is the subject of anger.

·      Speak badly to your children but do not allow others to speak badly of them.

·      Hold grudges forever.

·      Do not admit that you are wrong unless, of course, you are a child and an adult is demanding your confession.

·      Do not lie, but also do not believe the person if they say that they only want you to tell the truth. You will get into trouble for telling the truth.

·      Do not criticize your country – love it or leave it.

·      Treat those who are different with respect but make sure they stay on their side of the track.

·      Assume that bad people go to jail and good people stay out of jail.

·      Do not hit unless your are an adult or protecting someone in the family.

·      Do not disagree or talk back to your parents or other adults even if you are repeating something they said or did.

·      Do not let anyone outside the immediate family know what goes on in the family.

·      Dress properly – what was proper did change over the years although there is still “rules” for one should dress no matter how old one is.

·      Do not talk about sex.

·      Color in the lines.

·      There is almost always a right way to do some behavior.

·      Do not demonstrate about political issues, which may have had something to do with not drawing attention to one or the family.

This list could be much longer. It seems as if there are rules for just about every aspect of behavior.  If one violates one of the rules, there is seemingly a rule about how one “scolds” the person who broke the rule.  The scolding can be delivered with a sigh and a sense of grave disappointment.  Scolding could be pretty intense

For example, not to be outdone by any Jewish stereotype, my mother did not hesitate to tell one “You are not a child of mine. No child of mine could behave that way.  You will never darken my doorstep again or contact me in any way.”

Of course, one is also made aware of rules by teachers, school administrators, ministers, other relatives and sometimes neighbors/friends of the family.  These cover everything from behavior in church to private behavior such as masturbation/playing with oneself. Some of these rules are labeled as sins which, of course, means that if you broke the rules you were not only a grave disappointment to your family and/or the minister but also to God.

There are also the habits an individual or a family often developed for very practical reasons. These might include the time of meals, who might host Sunday dinner, what meals were called, what was served for a meal, whether or not particular family members consumed alcohol or coffee, and the standard of home and personal cleanliness.  Some of these habits were also rules and/or sins.

Then, of course, there are the laws, some of which vary within a country or from country to country.  It seems as if there were fewer laws when I was younger. For example many parental behaviors, which were quite acceptable when I was young, would now be considered child abuse or neglect.  We have also added laws to cover new technology such as smart cars, the internet, video games, school standards and a wide variety of other behavior in addition to the standard ones such as those about robbery of a merchant which is different than corporate robbery or rape of the land, murder (more complicated), use of alcohol and other drugs, the role of doctors and other health care professionals, use of airspace, and, of course, the host of laws which determine whether a behavior is considered wrong or immoral.  Additional laws may cover such issues as rendition or torture, and the killing of those a nation decides is its enemy or someone heading a country that is not friendly towards one. 

It is interesting that one of the messages we also give to our children is ‘think for yourself”.  Yet, it seemed and often still seems as if many times when a child thinks for himself or herself we tell them that they are bad or wrong.   The children then learn to hide what they are doing or to refrain from thinking outside the box with has been built from the rules, habits and laws they have been taught to obey.

Yet, most of us recognize that most, of not all, helpful inventions, creative art, scientific discoveries, or interesting new recipes have come about because someone or some group of people thought outside the box – broke a rule, changed a habit, or broke a law.  People who broke both rules and laws or culturally accepted behavior have made all of the advances we have made in deceasing discrimination.  I was talking to a older woman I know who was relating the fact that she and her college roommates got into trouble for going off campus without hats and gloves.  No longer does it seem strange for women to wear pants instead of dresses.  We no longer overtly endorse the glass ceilings.  Stay at home dads are become more common and, thus, more accepted.  Young people living together “in sin” prior to getting married is now the norm in this country although in other countries and some cultures in this country that is not the case.   Gays and Lesbians can now get married in a number of states in the United States and in a number of other countries. 

We have satellites, cell phones, many television channels, smart cars, drones, commercial airplanes, more kitchen appliances than most kitchens can accommodate, store bought clothes, laser eye surgery, outpatient removal of cataracts, organ transplants and open heart surgery. We also have cyber crime, more worldwide population than we can take care of, water shortages, global warm and earthquakes, which might be related to fracking.

It seems that we humans are going to continue to try to restrict how and when we think outside the box.  We also go to continue to attribute certain behavioral patterns to what we imagine or think or hope that God wants because it frightens us to think otherwise.  We are going to continue to punish those who make us uncomfortable by chastising them for breaking the family, community or cultural rules.  At the same time we will come to accept and even celebrate some changes often forgetting that they were first thought to be bad or wrong.  We will probably continue to try to shame people into following our rules.   Sometimes we will use the power of laws in an attempt to make people do what one group or individuals thinks is the right thing. 

My point is that rules, laws and habits can be very useful. It is only wen we make them sacred (not always in a religious sense) that they keep us from hearing and challenging each other to think outside the box; to experiment with whether a rule, law or habit has outlived its usefulness.

Hopefully, particularly as parents, we will support and challenge each other to both protect our children and give them room to color outside the box.

At this time of the year when folks are graduating from having completed a portion of their formal education, perhaps they would be well advised to consider the purpose of a rule, habit or law.  If it is to keep the family or community comfortable or to control a person or group of people by instilling fear then, perhaps, it is time to consider letting go of that rule, habit or law.