The elderly man and I stood just outside the fog line on the busy-at-that-time two-lane highway. The strip of pavement between the fog line and the gravel is narrow at that point. The gravel shoulder is itself narrow before sloping down into the shallow, weedy ditch.
We have no crosswalk. We have no Ped Xing sign. We have no caution sign of any sort. We have no diminished speed zone. We have no immediately local law enforcement. Neither were the elderly man and I showing any sign of wishing to cross the road back to the side where we live.
Yet one driver on our side of the road slowed. And stopped. There was no need. Really. We were fine. But in deference to her thoughtfulness, we crossed.
Now. Consider. This.
There is a stretch of road hard by the local high school that has flashing lights warning of a 15-mile-per-hour restriction that are turned on long before the first students start arriving and remain on long after they have opened their math books. […]
Now and then a driver who thinks the charade ridiculous will just brazenly barrel through at the normal 25 mph, and now and then I am that driver. The reason that people don’t do it more often is not, I think, for love of high schoolers but because of an aversion to speeding tickets. […]
I was reflecting on this the other morning as I crawled through Rices Mill Road feeling like an idiot and a hypocrite. I was thinking philosophically about law and will and character and civics and other lofty ideas. I was pondering a citizenry whose morality is dictated solely by external laws. […]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought so at least in his address “A World Split Apart.” The Russian told an American audience about their country: […]
“But a society with no other scale but the legal one is … less worthy of man.”
The Apostle Paul, in exhorting the Galatians to stop turning back to the observance of innumerable laws, is not trying to lessen their moral sense but to increase it. […]
Paul urges that the internal compass is superior to the external compass. […] In short, do not quench the voice of the Spirit within you in slavish tyranny to external law.
What kind of citizen are we?
What motivates and guides our living in this society?
Would this culture survive if everyone practiced our kind of citizenship? 😯
Source: External compliances | Andrée Seu Peterson
PS: What my elderly friend and I were doing by the side of the road (and why we were there in the first place) is extraneous to the point. 🙂