So, I’m a teacher. And one of my least favorite things about being a teacher is classroom rules. I have never thought much about creating them, and despite what my fellow teachers around me are usually doing during the first few days of class every year, I tend to avoid the entire process if at all possible. Instead, I give my students the “laws are for the lawless” speech.
In the “laws are for the lawless” speech, as my former students know, I talk about how pointless classroom rule making is, especially in a high school, and how I prefer to operate on a system where my students behave in such a way that I don’t have to control their behavior through such silly rules because… they will control themselves.
I can always tell, by the look in their eyes, which students in my classes, during those first few days of class each year, have never thought of things in that way before. I always have several students who have never realized that self-control is a better way.
In a letter thanking soldiers in service to their country in 1798, John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”. What is less often quoted from this letter is the few lines before this, where Adams says that there is no government that is capable of controlling unbridled human passions. To paraphrase him, there has to be something within us that is interested in self-control, as a nation, if our government has any hope of being successful.
I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately, but many different people have many different opinions as to which parts of our government –state, local, federal– are successful and to what extent they are so.
Additionally, I don’t know if you are seeing a lot of self-control going on in your neck of the woods, from the people around you.
In the end, it is as I have always told my students that it is –> laws are for the lawless. In my classes, I am happy to say, I have been able –more often than not– to foster an understanding with my students that their self-control keeps me from having to be in control. In fact, whenever a student steps out of line in my class (ask my students, they’ll tell you), I gently say to them, “Either you’re going to control you or I’m going to control you.”
Unfortunately, what you are more likely to see these days from the citizens in our once-great nation is not self-control. As unfortunate as this is, it’s even more unfortunate to see those out-of-control members of our citizenry getting irate when the government comes in to try to establish control. What hasn’t occurred to them, just like it hasn’t occurred to several of my students at the start of every class year, is that the government wouldn’t have to establish control of the people if the people would control themselves.
John Adams knew this, and he knew that the government, truth be told, isn’t even capable of controlling people who can’t or won’t control themselves. In the end, the only thing that can control any of us is ourselves.
It occurred to me today that I think that most of us are easily distracted. To greater or lesser extents, we may think that we have a quality of focus, but I think that we are probably all more distracted than we realize.
For example, it’s been a while since I took a long drive in a car (because of the pandemic and the quarantine), but I still remember the experience. Specifically, when it comes to particular drives that you take over and over again, have you ever noticed that it is your particular pattern to look at the same things every time? On my way to work in the mornings, I would always look at this particular house on this side of the road at a certain point in the drive, and I would always look at that particular tree on that side of the road during that particular part of the drive.
How did I get into those patterns? Why do I choose to repeatedly look at the things that I look at? More importantly, what am I missing when I’m habitually facing this way at this point and that way at that point? What am I missing?
I suspect that this is a metaphor for our lives. The pandemic and the quarantine have taught me a lot of things, and this is one of them.
I wonder if anyone else is noticing things that they didn’t notice before because things have been shaken up so substantially that we are being freed from out habitual distractions.
What happens if that house I look at, on the east side of road 3.75 miles into my commute, gets destroyed in a fire? Will I then be able to notice the beautiful flower garden planted for years at that same place on the other side of the road?
Perhaps it shouldn’t take a house burning down (or a global pandemic) to get me to be more observant.
And, it’s unfortunately the case, I’m afraid that we are being lead around by powers all around us that are relying on us continuing to be distracted by what has always distracted us. Maybe I’m just being paranoid a little bit, but I am starting to wonder whether or not the distractions that have been in place, many of which have fallen away, were there to begin with to keep us distracted.
I guess, deep down, I am hoping that I’m not the only one who is looking around and thinking, “How can we get some really substantial, long-lasting, societal change out of all of this chaos?”
It Occurred To Me Today 