Some rules are made to be broken—or at least tested.
During the last 200 yards of a state cross-country meet, a first year student from my hometown high school stumbled, apparently due to complete exhaustion. It didn’t look like she could finish the race as her arms and legs wouldn’t coordinate anymore. Her body was telling her that it had had enough. But two other young women felt otherwise. While several runners passed by securing their place on the scoreboard, two strangers from competing schools stopped to pick up the young woman and, together, they helped her finish. All three of the racers were disqualified from the event because it is against the rules to help another runner cross the finish line. When asked why she helped the runner off the ground, one of the young women quipped, “I helped, because she needed the help.”
Some rules are made to be broken—or at least tested.
I try not to talk too much about my children in these posts but, sometimes, I can’t resist. One of my sons is a pretty quiet, reserved adolescent. He loves ironic humor, follows political discussions when I think he is only interested in video games, and enjoys a good pun. On occasion, when he has done something for which he knows he is in trouble, he responds to my inquiry in a quasi-rehearsed monotone, and a language pattern that seems strange but vaguely familiar. Only later do I realize that he is quoting Bart Simpson, and I believe it was a channeled Bart Simpson that also landed him in “59B,” our middle school equivalent to the Russian Gulag.
In the United States today, there are cameras in the hallways of almost every middle school and high school. They are there because of Columbine and Sandy Hook, but people of my generation can’t help but wonder if George Orwell wasn’t right after all. The camera to the school’s entry keeps people who have no business being at the front door from entering. Cameras focused on the parking lot monitor activity outside the school’s perimeter. But neither my son nor his buddies could figure out the purpose for the hallway camera. The halls were too busy during the change in classes to really see anything, and when classes were in session, the hallway was empty. After several years of being perturbed by “being watched, Dad,” my son apparently decided that a little act of civil disobedience was in order. So, periodically and between classes, he would stop in front of a camera—and stare.
I only found out about this little charade during dinner one night. When we debriefed about school, our son ever so quietly mentioned that he had been spending some time in “59B.”
“59B? 59B? What did you do?” I asked.
“I stared at the camera. Well, actually, I’ve been staring at the camera for awhile.”
“What camera?” I said. “And why have you been staring?”
“The cameras in the hallways,” he said, with his best Bart Simpson imitation.
“But why?”
“Dad—I just got tired of being watched.”
Some rules are made to be broken—or at least tested.
On March 10, 1960 a group of college students walked to the F.W. Woolworth Store in Little Rock, Arkansas where five of them—Charles Parker (22), Frank James (21), Vernon Mott (19), Eldridge Davis (19), and Chester Briggs (18) took a seat at the soda fountain counter. Though it’s hard to believe today, sitting at that counter was an act of civil disobedience because these five young men were African American.
I recently saw that soda fountain counter on display at the American History Museum in Washington, D.C. It was situated in the middle of a rather large lobby that was swarming with high school students who were likely visiting our nation’s capital for the first time. For most of those students, the display was a counter from a type of restaurant that doesn’t exist anymore. Without reading the description, there was no reason for anyone under the age of twenty-five to see anything out of the ordinary, or even imagine a day when another human being in our country could be denied service because of the pigmentation of his or her skin. But it happened—and it still happens.
There are some rules that are to be broken—or at least tested. Sometimes these acts of civil disobedience are innocuous, like helping a stranger through the finish line or staring in silent defiance at a hallway camera. Some other times, these acts require tremendous courage, and they even start to change a nation.
I don’t know for sure why some people get it in their heads to test the rules, particularly the ones that, over time, seem to be just a little silly and, in some cases, crudely unjust. I’m grateful for these people. Quiet leaders who every now and again show us a better way.
