This week's Berkshire Eagle
Berkshire Eagle
I, Publius

The trouble with rules By Alan Chartock
Special to the Eagle


Saturday, February 07, 2004 - To those feeling confined by restrictive rules, I offer some observations -- and consolation:


Never have a boss. The more boss-free your life is, the better off you are. I'll grant you that many of us have had great bosses in our lives. We remember them with fondness and thank the heavens that they were there for us. Sooner or later, however, you are bound to get a boss who is mean or power-hungry or a control freak or just plain stupid. There are those rare jobs that will get you into a nearly boss-free situation. Tenured professors are almost boss-free unless you get a college president, dean or chairman with blood in his or her eye. I tell my children that it is best not to have a boss.

Every law or new rule is generally there because someone messed up. When your plane lands and the flight attendant cautions you to "exercise care when opening the overhead compartment because contents may have shifted in flight," or to "wait until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the fasten-seatbelt sign before moving about in the aisles," you can be sure that someone got hit in the head with a piece of luggage or fell over in the aisle and sued the airline for $5 million.
If you read your employment manual, you will undoubtedly see lots of examples of this. "Downloading of pornographic materials on your work computer is strictly forbidden" is quite popular these days, bearing witness to the fact that a lot of people are both stupid and naughty. In this litigious society when you catch someone breaking a rule at work, they'll turn on you and say, "Hah! Show me where in the employment manual it says this type of action is forbidden." Voilà: instant revision of the manual.

I know a Chinese restaurant where they always warn people that if they are going to use their spoons to cut the won tons in the won-ton soup, they have to be aware that they may tip over the bowl. Everyone who gets the soup gets the lecture. This is happening, of course, because they are serving the soup not in nice, heavy ceramic bowls but in light plastic bowls. The restaurant had the choice of either replacing their soup bowls or making a new rule. They chose the new rule route. Some lawyer probably told them to.


There are two Golden Rules. There is the wonderful rule about doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. In the post-Freud age, we now know that this is not always as simple as it seems. Let's say you have a masochistic personality and you like getting dumped on. Does the Golden Rule suggest that you should do unto others as you would have done unto yourself? See what I mean?
There is another Golden Rule, much more appropriate to modern American government and the present crowd in the White House. This rule reads, "He or she who has the gold, rules." We can see this as the fat cats ship jobs overseas, give themselves tax cuts, buy the media, reduce real benefits to people and accumulate more money than they could use in six lifetimes.


Curb your dog. This is probably the most ignored rule in America. It is not only ignored, it is gleefully ignored. It is ignored despite the efforts of towns and cities to pass rules requiring dog owners to use pooper-scoopers under penalty of a fine. We all know that when your neighbor passes your house with a 100-pound dog, the only time they'll clean up the dog's mess is when they know someone is watching them. The Chartocks have invisible fencing and only on the rare occasion when the thing is malfunctioning do we present a risk to our neighbors.
I also suspect that folks with a streak of the devil in them leave dog droppings on other people's property, knowing it's the wrong thing to do. I would be a liar if I said I hadn't looked the other way during a life of dog owning.


The "Turn the Other Cheek" rule. This rule makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of pathologically unhappy people out there who would stand on your shoulders in order to make themselves feel bigger. These people seek to wreak havoc on you in an effort to feel better about themselves. They are very, very sick.
The best way to frustrate these unhappy souls is not to respond. The more you engage them, the more you raise their unrequited need for self-esteem. If you leave them alone, you take away their power.

On the other hand, there are times, as in cases of sexual harassment, when you cannot afford to do that. That's when you bring in the authorities. The problem with many of these kinds of emotionally charged incidents is that if you don't respond, they can escalate. Of course, that's when they often break the law. Too bad it has to go so far before it stops.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan Chartock, a Great Barrington resident, is chairman and executive director of WAMC Northeast Public Radio and a professor of communications at SUNY-Albany.
- posted by Alan @ 2/07/2004 01:52:00 PM