Routine mayhem in America is the “new normal?” Not only is it not “normal” it is not “new.” The soul searching and despairing cries of “Why?” echo again across the nation. The blood of one group of victims is not even dry before the next massacre occurs. How to account for it?
The calls go out for new laws, new law enforcers, new punishments, increasing use of the “death penalty.” None has worked in the past, but no matter, the devolution into insanity proceeds apace on all sides of the debate, at least as defined by Albert Einstein, if apocryphally: “doing the same things over again and expecting a different result.”
I have a radical suggestion: try something different. Once, long ago, the evolution of humanity threw up a supreme law, one that ought to rule all laws, if the heaving mass of animalistic proto-humans were to rise to human being. Thou shall not kill.
That is and must be the first law. It must rule all other law. All other law must be subordinate to it, and must be interpreted and applied consistent with it, or all law fails its task of approaching justice. Why?
If killing is not repudiated, it invites more killing. Revenge cycles abound. Killing, ironically, is pregnant, not with life, but with more killing. Pregnant with death. Once killing is embraced as justice, there is no end to killing but in the silence of the universal graveyard. This was the ancient wisdom revealed in this one law to rule them all: start with no killing and…