I had to go take a defensive drivin’ course to make it right. One careless moment an’ my heavy foot had earned me six hours of watching videos filled with mangled teenagers an’ train wrecks. All so I could regain my place in what they call “law-abiding” society.

Except this here nation ain’t a law abiding society. There ain’t a single law-abiding soul in this society an’ there ain’t a single “law abiding” country in the world. You may not want to admit this, but it is true.

The reason for this is that there are too many laws to abide. Even the best of us breaks a law now an’ then. It’s impossible not to because ever thing we do is governed by some sort of law. Every place we go there’s some kind of law telling us exactly what to do and how to do it. Even if a body puts all their energy into followin’ every law they run into, and a few folks do that, they are bound to mess up a time or two. Soon as they do, they are criminals in the eyes of the law.

So the truth is that none of us are innocent. We are all guilty. This is a condition that is called “original sin” in the Christian faith. Some folks believe God blames us all for our ancestor’s crime involvin’ a certain fruit back in the Garden of Eden.

I don’t know about that but I do know that whether the Maker did it to us or not...we are guilty.

Few are willin’ to admit it though. We justify and rationalize the fact that we ease past a stop sign or drop a piece of litter or fudge on our taxes. We don’t want to admit that we are crooks because crooks are “bad” people.

In order to maintain the fiction that we are “law-abiding” folks, we have changed the rules to suit our purposes.

You’re not a criminal when you break the law. You’re only a crook when you get caught.

Now this is a much easier system than actually obeyin’ the law. There ain’t enough policemen to catch all of us in our crooked ways. If there were, and we were caught, then we could never afford enough prisons to hold us all. Besides that, the police, being human, break laws just as much as the rest of us, so they’d have to go in the clink too and then who’d be left on the outside to hold the keys?

So fully enforcin’ the law just ain’t practical. Therefore we do a half-hearted job of it and only the least capable and most careless of us ever get caught and put in jail. This is how we think it should be since a person who is dumb enough to get caught deserves what they get. It’s called “survival of the fittest.” At least that’s what we think until we are caught. Then we want our “rights” and a good lawyer to get us off.

Nobody’s surprised that President Clinton might have broken the law to cover up his peccadilloes. We expect our leaders to be crooked. After all, we’re crooked and our leader is one of us. How else could it be?

We are just worried that a man who is dumb enough to get caught might not have enough snap to be a good President.

This ability to fool ourselves is what allowed President Nixon to declare he was “not a crook” even though he had clearly broken the laws of the land. He wasn’t lying. He believed he wasn’t a criminal...just like we do.

After all, who wants to be known as a law breaker? Law breakers are “bad.” In all of human society, people who are caught breaking the law are shunned and feared.

Who wants to be shunned and feared? Not me, that’s why I try never to get caught. Most of the time I even try to obey the law.

Now let’s think for a minute how this all came about. There was a time when the only law in the world was the law of the wild. The biggest, toughest and smartest ruled. After all, humans are just animals with pretenses and the law is perhaps our greatest pretense.

We pretend we ain’t “animals” and play like we are superior to the other members of the animal kingdom. We can do this because we are the meanest, toughest and most deadly killers on the planet. Therefore, we get to make the rules. And, the biggest and toughest, smartest and meanest of the humans get to make the rules for the rest of us.

In the beginnin’ the toughest guy in the tribe got to make all the rules, but eventually, human cooperation evolved to the point that a group of little guys could get together and kill off a big, mean guy. Then, the little guys had to establish agreements for cooperation that allowed ’em to remain a united front against the next big, mean guy that came along. Thus, the law.

Now don’t get me wrong. I ain’t talking down our system. I think the law is the greatest human invention ever.

Without laws we’d never have any peace. Inside, we are still a bunch of wild and savage animals no matter whether we dress up in business suits or not. Almost any of us will take advantage of another when we get the chance. We need laws.

All of our religions are just systems of law. God’s the judge. Hell’s the ultimate prison. Moses started off the Judeo-Christian world with our first ten laws. Almost none of us obey all those laws but even so, we’ve been adding to ‘em ever since. They set rules of behavin’ that are designed to control the beast within. That’s a good thing. We need that.

But we need something else too. We need to remember that nobody is perfect. Nobody is, as it says in the Bible, “justified in the eyes of the Lord.” In other words, we’re all just a bunch of slippery, finaglin’ monkeys out for ourselves. There’s a lot of good in us...but there’s also a lot of bad.

The thing we need to learn more about is forgiveness. A body that can’t forgive another is the ultimate hypocrite because, what gives any of us the right to judge another? After all, we’re a bunch of crooks. The best thing our system of laws offers us is “honor among thieves.”

So when you’re watchin’ that six o’clock news and feelin’ good about judgin’ those dirt bags that got caught breakin’ the law, remember the truth about yourself and see if you can find the strength to forgive. When everybody is talkin’ down ol’ President Clinton, instead of joining in on the bashing, maybe you can think about how hard it must be when everyone expects you to be perfect and the world is watchin’ your every move.

Forgiving a person don’t mean that you think what they did is right. It means “giving as you did before” It means not hardenin’ your heart to another human being who has made a mistake and is goin’ through a very hard time.

I think we need a law about that. Yep, that’s the ticket. Let’s pass a law that all of us have to forgive each other every time we make a mistake. Why, that would make the whole world a better place to live. Everybody would have to forgive everybody else! Why, a law like that could end war and hatred and cruelty ...

Wait a minute. Who am I foolin’? We’d all just break the law.

What a dang bunch of crooks!