Breaking the Law

Two of my earliest childhood memories are of breaking the law.

I’ve had a long, intimate relationship with chewing gum, you see. I discovered it as a toddler, and I’ve chewed it ever since. Just ask my wife! I think our yearly chewing gum budget is in the hundreds of dollars. Well, for a moment, consider these factors:

• Three-year-old who loves chewing gum.
• Three-year-old knows where Mommy buys chewing gum at the counter in the store near the apartment complex
• Mommy tells 3-year-old “no, you can’t have any chewing gum”.
• Mommy sends 3-year-old outside to play.
• There are no fences around the apartment complex.

Though you can do the math, I’m certain, let me lay it out for you. I trotted down to the nearby convenience store. I opened the door. I looked the cashier right in the eye, reached up high, and grabbed a package of Hubba-Bubba from the counter display. I walked out the door, opening the package and shoving two pieces in my mouth at once.

The cashier was one of my mother’s friends. Apparently, before I even got home, she’d called my house. My mother was awaiting me at the door, “stickered switch” in hand (a small sapling off a tree).

I received a stern lecture. The part of the lecture that stuck with me, however, was the part involving the stickered switch.

My second experience breaking the law occurred at the tender age of five. We lived in a brown rental home on Rhame Drive in Fort Washington, Maryland. My mother, a few months earlier, had married a gentle, law-abiding Mormon man, and we’d been quite active in the church and community.

One of my favorite features of this home was the generous wooded area immediately behind it. I would spend long hours walking alone in the woods. I remembered being able to walk all the way to the large, green water tower nearby without ever following a man-made path.

I was returning from an exploration one day, and heard an unusual sound from our neighbor’s fenced yard. It was sharp, explosive, and interesting. I climbed the outside of the fence and peeked over. On the other side, I saw one of my blonde, pre-teen neighbors holding a large rock, preparing to hurl it at an upstairs window of the home.

“Whatcha’ doin’?” I asked, genuinely interested. Nobody had lived in this house as long as I’d lived on Rhame Drive (two years). Nobody lived there, therefore I didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing; I was just curious why he was doing it.

“Breaking some windows. It’s fun. Want to try?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said. This looked kind of exciting. I’d been bored, anyway. I knew the woods forward and backwards, and had long ago stopped encountering anything new in them. So young, there were few things to keep me interested besides reading books and the beginning of kindergarten.

He demonstrated good throwing technique. My initial efforts were pitiful. I’d never been much of a rock-thrower. I couldn’t even reach the lowest-floor window from the rear fence of the small quarter-acre lot. However, within a few minutes of pecking hopelessly at the side of the house with my stones, I finally discovered that I could throw reasonably well using a “sidearm” technique. I eventually managed to hit the remains of an already-shattered window with my rock. The jagged chunks of the broken window splintered with a satisfying crunch.

“Try the big one!” my new friend suggested. I wasn’t sure what he meant, until he gestured to the large sliding-glass window. It was intact. I threw a few pebbles at it with no effect. Eventually, the blonde boy handed me a very large rock.

I knew I couldn’t reach the window from that distance. “I think I’ll have to move up,” I said. I walked within a few feet of the window, and threw with all my might with both arms.

The plate glass exploded inward with an amazingly rich, vibrant sound. It was pretty darn cool, I thought, and a really good throw of a really big rock for a scrawny five-year-old.

However, it was also really pretty darn loud. My new-found buddy glanced around nervously, peeked over the fence, and explained that it was time for him to go home for dinner. I followed, since without anybody there to notice my efforts, it was pointless to throw the rocks.

The policeman arrived at my door a few hours later after I’d gone to bed for the night.

Think about the picture, for a moment. Allow me to use my mother’s words to describe the scenario:

“These other boys were bigger; 10 or 12 years old. They were breaking windows out of the vacant house 2 doors down from us. The home had been vacant for quite some time. You started breaking windows, too. When the cop came and got the older boys, they blamed you and said you were the one that started it and were the leader. The policeman was trying to find this hardened criminal, the boy who started it all. They said it was your fault, and you should be in trouble instead of them. “After he showed up on our doorstep, here this tiny five-year-old comes down the steps in his pajamas, the supposed ringleader of this little gang. and asks “what’s wrong?”. The police officer looked totally stunned for a few moments. The policeman said, “I understand you boys were out there breaking windows”. You said, “Well nobody wanted that house!”. Anyway, the policeman gave you a talking-to. He told you, “if you were eight years old, I’d take you to juvenile hall”. He also told you that you were sure lucky, since you were the ringleader, that you were only five. Afterward, he verbally took the other boy by the ear, and got on his case about trying to blame a five-year-old.”

From my perspective, I remember the blonde boy, standing next to the uniformed man with two other boys I’d never seen before, all three of them saying they saw me breaking the windows. I readily admitted that I’d broken the windows, not knowing it was wrong. However, I protested that I was being blamed by the kid who broke them with me, and didn’t know the other two boys, so how could they possibly blame me? It seemed colossally unfair that I was receiving a lecture from the policeman about my behavior when the original perpetrator, who’s example I’d followed, stood there guiltless. I think I missed the part where the police officer castigated the other boys for blaming me afterwards.

Regardless, I received a stern warning from the policeman, with a solemn explanation that, had I only been a few months older (8 years old), he’d have taken me into juvenile hall due to my actions. I didn’t know what juvenile hall was, and upon being told it was “jail for kids”, I was terrified.

I never broke another window in anything until the day I wrecked my car at 17. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, that’s my history as a lawbreaker. I’ve occasionally broken the odd one here or there, as most people have. Youthful indiscretions, you know. Regardless, due to these somewhat traumatic experiences as a youth, I grew up fearing and respecting the law, and not wishing to cross it ever again.

Yet today, with a better understanding of the nature of law, propriety, politics, and human relationships, I can’t help wondering if there aren’t times when violation of law is called for. I respect those with the courage to face jail time in support of civil liberties.

• Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. And went to jail for it.
• John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Marion Barry (yes, the same Marion Barry) courageously purchased items and sat at a lunch counter reserved for white people, the restriction enforced by law. And they went to jail for it.
• Indian Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi repeatedly violated laws throughout his life because he considered them unjust. And went to jail for it.
• Tennessee resident Joe Hogue went to jail for telling his son that gay people aren’t damned to hell for eternity.
• Early unionizers endured beatings, jail time, and in some cases, completely “legal” execution for sedition trying to obtain rights to fair compensation and safe working conditions for factory workers.

I find myself wondering what the frontiers of morally-correct lawlessness are today? What is the unjust legislation the people are rejecting en masse?

The largest one I see is copyright law. I suspect that our current situation of draconic copyright lengths, litigation, and enforcement cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Petty shoplifting and vandalism aside, when do you think violating the law is justified?

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” — Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT