We have become vastly improved because of the lockdown. We have a better world today; you just don’t see it in the news. But everybody knows in their own life that things got better – we matured, we were wiser, and we’re kinder. Now all of that positive improvement is concealed behind the riots and the fear of a repeat of COVID.
Recently many people have gotten caught up in the argument between the idea the “Black lives matter” and “all lives matter”. Either way, focusing on the idea that lives “matter” reduces things so much. We need to get beyond the idea of “mattering” and strive for something more. “Lives matter” makes life negotiable – matters how much? Matters to whom?
Life is sacred. What that means in simple terms is that it doesn’t matter whether life “matters”. You’re not allowed to murder and you’re not allowed to steal – even if life doesn’t “matter” to you still can’t kill, and you can’t kill anybody. That’s morality, and that’s the core of Torah without any mention of race.
Along those lines, the whole structure of the police force needs to be rethought. The police does law enforcement, when they really should do law maintenance. You maintain the laws that people live by, instead of enforcing the laws the people don’t want. A democracy means people get together, write down their values on a charter and elect the government that’s going to maintain their values and a police force that will maintain the laws that they want to have. Instead, we’ve been putting laws on people who didn’t ask for it. For example, we all believe that speeding on the road is bad, but sometimes we get distracted and do it anyway. The police aren’t there to force you to do what they believe is right, they are there to remind you of your own values! In case you should forget that you don’t believe in speeding, we have traffic patrol.
When we have cooperation, good things can happen. But if we don’t have personal values then you can’t have a police force because that’s just a declaration of war. We need an awakening. We need to simply find the failure of our lifestyle staring us in the eyes. The good news is that the way we’ve been living is such a colossal failure, and we don’t need any more motivation than that to change.
