I saw a video clip from Fox News regarding a gun debate, the point of this video, or more subjectively the points I heard were Democrats bad want guns, NRA good save guns.
This video got me thinking, not about guns or political parties, but something deeper. An idea was emerging, but like a sand castle as the tide comes in any moment a wave will come and wash it away.
A World Imagined
"We're almost there" I tell myself... a short pause, heavy breaths mist the crisp air as I bring myself upright and squint out at the horizon beyond. "This is reality," I think as my lungs burn in their attempt to heat up crystal like air. Then, I'm nearly blinded and forced to avert my eyes from that horizon. The fog has started to shimmer, blurring details, as the rising Sun's reflection scatters erratically across the land. While taking this moment to gain my barrings, I pull out a map from my vest pocket, fumbling through thick gloves to carefully unfold the sheet. "I'm almost in another state", I consider while staring at the map. I look back up at the horizon with newly adjusted vision, I twist right, then left. Adjusting the position of my rifle as the trigger guard digs into my ribs. "There's nothing there, no change", I think to myself. I quickly look back at the map, in what I now realize was an attempt stamp out the conflicting realities raging as I would stamp out a spark thrown from a misbehaving fire. Unfortunately, the map like the boot could not stop the inevitable inferno as one spark became two and two became three and three became five.
Sitting in my chair moving my hand through my beard, as I often do when considering my thoughts. Again returning to that invisible line. "The line isn't real," I think to myself over and over. Many arguments flowed through the river of consideration, "you don't have to see something for that thing to be real," or "force certainly makes it real, if you were to break a law unique to that state that isn't the law in another state you would be punished, making this line real." These considerations were meant to solve the dilemma, but they only raised more complex questions. I began to consider what a law is. In the scientific realm a law is a factual statement of reality, but in society a law is more of an agreement within a community. So crossing this non-existent line, does that make me part of the community on the other side and therefore subject to their agreements. If I am a part of the community and the community must agree for there to come into existence an agreement. Then, if I do not agree to a particular agreement is not the law void? If the law is not void in this case am I less a member of and more accurately a subject to the community? If I'm a subject to, then is not the community more accurately a tyranny?
I became aware that I was straying from the spark that originated these considerations and once more returned to the most basic question surrounding this idea. What is reality? I looked up the definition of reality and then for good measure looked up the definition of substance. I came to a realization, the line is not real, it's an abstract idea, dreamed into existence and kept alive through the breath of children in history classes.
Now that I believed the line to not be reality I began to wonder what other systems have I believed into my reality? Where do systems end and realities begin?
Our current system of lines was imagined into existence over 200 years ago and codified with the ink of 39. The ink was paid for with blood, the blood donated to remove inks of the past. This which I hold dear is clearly a system meant to bend and twist reality, but is this necessarily bad? This system is certainly far better than any others. After all a system is built to organize, to remove chaos from reality. Is the chaos really gone though or is that chaos just buried beneath the system waiting to rise forth from the smallest of cracks?
The crippling realization arrives:
After the dusts of battles settled. The thousand year old chains held by tyrant kings were broken. New pens were filled with fresh ink, that we could be our own masters. But how quickly we forgot reality, one cannot be a master without creating a slave. Just as one cannot imbue rights, lest they can take them away.
