In Continuum.

Every country has a justice system, every country has a set of laws set in place to tell its people what they can or cannot do. Like, in Ohio, it is illegal to get a fish drunk. In Miami, it is illegal to skate in a police station. In Florida, unmarried women who parachute on Sundays can be jailed. The head of any dead whale found on the British coast is legally the property of the King; the tail, on the other hand, belongs to the Queen - in case she needs the bones for her corset. Those dumb rules are on top of the usual laws about stealing, killing, raping, and all that jazz. That law applies to everybody within that state, that country, depending on the system of the country itself. Even when you zoom in on a specific aspect of the society, like in school, we have rules to keep the little children in check. You know, like how my high school had a system whereby we had to ask for the "Toilet Card" from the teacher for us to pin on our breast pockets when we went to the restrooms. It was a stupid rule, but most of us abided to that rule because we didn't want to be canned. Yes, we were canned in high school with thick canes that looked like miniature broomsticks. We were terrorized by the power of the cane, but it's not like it stopped anybody from doing anything wrong or stupid. Students still gambled in school, surfed porn in school, smoked in school. Despite everything, it's not like human nature hasn't slipped through our justice system in every shape or form. 

It just got me thinking about it, how the laws of the country were set by a bunch of old men huddled together in a dark room, with quills and old parchments. That is the mental image that I have in my mind anyway, a bunch of old people writing lines after lines of what people can or cannot do, according to their own laws and their own likings. It may seem incredibly unfair most of the time, but that's just kinda how the society works - around rules written by a few people, by the winners. The winners almost always write the rules, they are the ones to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Somewhere down the line, Kim Jong Il and his predecessors probably thought it'd be a good idea to frame their own country as being the best country in the world, and everybody else outside of their borders to be the adversaries. They were wrong, and they still are very wrong. But history wasn't written by losers, always the winners. They win the battles and the war, and then they sit down somewhere to tell the future population of how great they were and how bad the losers were. That is how it works, and that is how it has been working throughout human history. Laws were passed from generations to generations, with changes made here and there. But the basic law of these laws is the same - always written by a few, to govern the many. 

It just got me thinking the other day when the media effects class mentioned something about the most horrific scene that we have seen on the news, or stuff like that. I think Bob mentioned the image of the planes smashing into the twin towers during 9/11, and he started talking about what he was doing when it happened. I agree that it was a horrific image, and it'd probably stir a few emotions even when you play it right now. It is an agreement that you do not have to show those videos again to convey the message that yes, it was a horrific act of terrorism, and yes it was an act that should never be allowed. Yet, to me, that image is probably not the most disturbing that I have ever experienced in my life. Though, at that point in time, it was probably the most shocking, the way I watched it live on television after my mother told me about it. I was reading the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy when she told me about it, and I was just surprised that such a thing happened, and thought it was an accident or something. The image of people jumping off those buildings probably comes close to being the most disturbing thing I have seen on the news though, but it doesn't come close to the video that came a few months afterwards. 

I remember seeing that video of four masked men and an American knelt in front of them. The masked men behind started saying something in a different language to the camera, all of them carrying machine guns in their hands and seemingly yelling out demands to whoever was supposed to see the video. It was a very long video, and they edited it for the news that evening when I was at home. The news reporter gave a summary of what the masked man demanded, and then he warned us about the footage we were about to see. The masked man kept the note he was holding, said something to the other three men behind, and one of those men grabbed the American by his hair. Everything was censored of course, but it was still gruesome enough for my imagination to run wild. I remember hearing the blood curling scream that came out from the man, and the way he begged for mercy as one of the masked men took out a knife from behind his back. The camera zoomed in onto the American's face, and you could see the knife coming into frame, followed by a swift motion across the American's throat. Then they stuck it into the wound, and they started to saw the man's head off behind the blurred part of the screen until his head came off. That was when his screams ended, just like that, abruptly over the speakers. The masked man held the severed head to the camera and mumbled something, and we were back to the news report. 

I was dumbfounded, I really was. I sat there in my seat, and I knew that I just witnessed the most disturbing image of my entire life, and nothing was going to top that - ever. Nothing has, actually, and I don't think anything is going to top that. I guess the reason why I brought it up is because of how lawless these people were, the way that they treated another human being like it was some animal in the market, or something. The man pleaded for his life, but it's not like it stopped the masked men from brutally murdering him on camera. They were not abiding to any morals, no laws in their minds, and they just did whatever they wanted to get what they wanted. You could tell, even though they were hidden behind a mask, that they were not following any fixed laws set down on pen and paper by anybody of a higher order. It was just them, doing what they were meant to do, what they wanted to do, and it involved killing an innocent man and then sending that video to the rest of the world. Law did not apply to these barbaric men - or did it? 

It just got me thinking how laws are not laws until you see them as laws. You could disregard the laws and then create your own laws, even if your own laws involve being lawless. They are still laws, and when you can create your own moral boundaries, then you don't have a moral boundary at all. What I mean is that if we create our own limits as to what we can do or cannot do, then there really isn't a limit as to what we can't do. We can be killing people, raping their corpses, raping their children, as long as it is within your "morals", which is non-existent. That is the reality of things though, that is how a lot of people in this world works. No matter what kind of laws you decide to set down in pen and paper, there are going to be people trying to set their own laws. You have a country or state's law, and then you have gangs creating their own laws in the neighborhoods. It is supposed to make them different, to distinguish themselves from the local law and order system. They want to be above the law, or to be in a different league completely. They don't want to be bound by these laws set by other people, laws that supposedly suppresses them, that oppresses them, that tells them what not to do. 

Laws were made to control people, and yes they limit the things you can or cannot do. That is law, and it is a social agreement by the majority of the people in this world. We do not argue, because a lot of laws make sense. Don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, and things like that. These are very basic laws that we all have to follow, and we follow it not because we have a gun pointed at our heads. It is because we are human beings, and we just don't do these stuff to one another. We have a conscience, and that is the moral law that we follow that does not require an authority to tell you. The recent case in regards to that father who imprisoned his own daughter in an underground dungeon as his sex slave for twenty-four years is just another testimony on how, when you set your own moral boundaries, you become bounded by nothing. Yet, these things happen, and it has been happening even since human beings existed. People have been raped, raped again, and such things happen all the time, with laws or without laws. It is like how you can never completely eradicate terrorism. You kill their boss, somebody takes over, and somebody takes over the person who is taking over, so on and so forth. It never, ever, ever ends. 

Humans are, by nature, rebellious. We need rules and regulations to control us, at least for the most part. Without them, our lives go haywire completely. I mean, think about the simple law of time, like how we have twenty-four hours in a day. What is time, if it isn't classified into numbers anyway. If we don't have the numbers, we are just in a constant state of NOW, if you know what I mean. So, we follow these natural laws about time as well, or else we'd never be able to organize anything. The same thing goes to basic human principles, how we do not kill each other, harm each other, because that is just not something that we do to each other. Justice shall be put upon those that intend to do harm to others, and our society shall never tolerate such crimes. Yet, the idea of justice is as equally a confusing term as the word "law". Justice, again, is flexible in most cases, and what is justice to one person may not be justice to another. You take justice into your own hands and you kill a child rapist - what does that make you? Does it make you look like you are above the law? It doesn't, and justice is ambiguous by itself like law, or any kind of laws in any country out there. 

I just think that while there isn't a perfect set of rules for a country, in any country, we try our best to follow what is the most fundamental aspect of us being humans, the fact that we are different from the other mammals. We have our morals and our values, and that should be the basis of everything that we do. No, we do not need religion to teach us to have morals, to have values. We, as human beings, should already know that. My point is that while the law and justice system in every country can always be so vague and ambiguous, I say we should strictly abide to these natural moral and value laws that we impose upon ourselves, simply by being human and being different from other animals out there. We should be our own judge, our own jury, and ourselves. We make our bed and we suffer our own consequences, and at the end of the day, such crimes are never going to be eradicated. But we make do, and we do our best. We try to follow a set of laws that we write for ourselves, and we keep in line. It is not an act of keeping people in control, like sheep in fences. It is merely an act to remind us - that we are, after all, human beings.