Moral Dilemma

06 Dec 09

Several days ago, the Colorado Board of Regents abruptly voted to rescind the long-established right of college students, professors, and other state CCW Permit holders to carry concealed on state campuses, reversing a nationwide trend in the opposite direction. The ruling was unexpected, completely capricious, and not in response to any particular incident. A predictable flurry of challenges is ongoing.

In the interim, many students have written, asking for advice. They are in a moral dilemma, not shared with those of us who are not students and do not frequent college campuses.

There are, or course, risks inherent to having guns around. However, there are also risks inherent to not having guns around. Risk-free personal choices don't exist in this matter, nor in most others.

This is our current situation within world history:

Congress, state and federal, no longer really makes "laws." They pass "leg islation," and then innumerable, unelected state and federal agencies, bureaus, boards, and committees swoop in and "interpret" the "Intent of Congress" (a curious phrase, since senators and congressmen rarely read legislation before voting on it), translating it into never-ending "regulations" and "rules," which, as we descend the food-chain, are re-translated into " policies," "procedures," "routines," and "agendas."

The volume is now so immense, incomprehensible, self-contradictory, and selectively/inconsistently enforced that it is impossible for even saintly among us to so much as know what "the Law" is, much less adhere to it, which, of course, makes all of us inadvertent, and more-or-less continuous, " law-breakers," priming us as targets, to one degree or another, for selective enforcement when any of us becomes too much an irritant to the current political regime.

Meanwhile, real criminals are, of course, not nearly so confused, perplexed, nor frustrated. They continue to victimize the rest of us, in most cases, with virtual impunity. In fact, the only apprehension that consistently haunts them, indeed the sole authentic deterrent to violent crime, is the possibility of accidently selecting an armed "victim."

"The Law" flows not only from this flawed framework of so-called " democratic process," but also from its underlying axioms of Justice, Dignity, Morality, and Logic. And, when these foundational underpinnings are disgracefully politicized, indeed hijacked, as is the case when conspicuously unconstitutional legislation is passed as a result of either willful ignorance or active criminality, ensuing laws, rules, and regulations are null and void at the outset, having failed to meet requisite essentials to create a duty of conscience to obey.

The bottom line brings us back to where we started:

You're on our own!

Regent Board members, and just about everyone else up the food-chain, could not possibly care less about anyone but themselves. Beastly, vicious massacrers will come and go, and they'll all still keep their jobs. This has certainly been the case at VA Tech, on both counts!

Accordingly, we citizens have to make timely decisions which reflect our own personal best interests, knowing full-well that sometimes we will be mistaken, and that we will never have all information we believe we need.

Decisions have to be made regardless, and we can't afford to spend much time thinking about what might have been!

There will be no relief, no divine guidance, and no guarantees. And, in the end, we're all dead anyway. Between then and now, I, for one, will face to the front and do my best to fulfill my destiny, as my limited connection with divinity gives me the vision to see it, bearing full, personal responsibility for everything I do, and everything I decide not to do.

/John