We are inundated with rules for most of our lives…rules of the house, rules of the game, rules of the road.  Roberts wrote a bunch of rules to help maintain civility and order in both public and private gatherings.  There are religious rules and civic rules that we have elevated to the designation of “laws” to indicate, somehow, that the consequence for not adhering to them is expectedly more severe than all of those others.  If we weren’t such a get-away-with-whatever-the-fuck-we-can species, we’d probably need a lot fewer rules, but we suck so bad, that even the rules we have are not working out so well as deterrents to bad behavior.

Presently, politicians, those ultimately tasked with enacting the rules, are the most blatant abusers.  It used to be that if one political faction disagreed with something, they would pose an argument and attempt to gain support in their favor.   Today, it seems that minority thinking can simply disobey without reprisal.  Alabama was instructed to redraw their voter districting map, (which had been gerrymandered to disenfranchise minority voters), by a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision.  Alabama’s response…”Fuck y’all!”  Wisconsin elected a state Supreme Court judge by a 12-point margin.  She is currently being impeached without trial by the super-majority Wisconsin Republican legislature to prevent her from being a deciding vote on such dire issues as abortion and voting rights.  Tommy Tuberville…I think just mentioning Tommy Tuberville says it all.  And…our Republican Congressional lawmakers, rather than fulfilling their oaths, have chosen instead to be the wingmen/women of the multiply-indicted traitors in the Trump mob, who, in a more enlightened era of our history, would have already been given their cigarettes and blindfolds before facing a firing squad.  Oh, for the good old days when rules were rules.