Four years ago, I purchased a small winter home in Arizona. It had become apparent that I needed to find a warmer place in the winter to take care of my health. So, each late fall, Pat and I take the long trip down and make the return trip back to Minnesota in the spring. I feel blessed that we are able to do this. But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about.
My home is in a small-gated community and to live there you have to join and live by the rules of the association that governs the community. They tell you what color you can paint your house and when it needs to be painted. They ask that your car stay in the garage and every one has to maintain an outside light on the front of your house that comes on at dusk and shuts off a dawn. There are many other rules, but basically its order and uniformity that they are striving to maintain. They know that without the rules someone would paint his house purple, the garages would fill with clutter and driveways would become parking places for old abandoned vehicles.
In the three years that I have lived there I have heard very little complaints about this tight-fisted approach to keep the place looking nice. Most of us are seniors and long past the age of doing the Jones’s one better. We just want to live peacefully and quietly with each other. There was time in our lives when the word “no” crept into too many of the things we said and did. Now we accept it.
I have in the past lived where people had a complete disregard for their property and how it infringes on the neighborhood. They become defiant if they were asked by neighbors or local authorities to get with the game, and take care of their place. “My property and my rules they would scream” and “if you don’t like it move. I have my rights.”
When the constitution was written it was stated that we all had certain unalienable rights. In other words, there were certain things under the constitution that no one could take away from you. They even gave us examples of it. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and back then you knew what that meant but in today’s litigious society that has come to mean almost anything. No one has the right to tell you no.
So many times, I have heard about young men and women who were living their lives somewhat out of control who joined the military service. It seemed to be the one place where someone else had complete control over your actions. A place where you couldn’t question authority or sue them. You did what you were told. This militaristic way of running a business was necessary to keep law and order and a well-oiled machine that has to be on the top of its game if we are going to survive. But beyond the ranks and out in the real world this kind of order does not exist in many places and everybody, right or wrong has their rights. The courts are full of examples. It’s this breakdown of society’s etiquette that will doom this society, not make it better.
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