Dear President-Elect Trump:
Yesterday I told you about two women who experienced personal tragedy in their lives at the hands of loved ones. Each was a non-physically apparent injury; the first, verbal and emotional abuse — the other, consensual sex between people where at least one of them was married to someone else.
I use the term “non-physically apparent injury” because it wouldn’t be accurate to say such injuries were nonphysical. Broken hearts, damaged minds, and frayed nerves are all very much physical. They don’t show up on an X-ray or MRI. Yet society reasonably understands that mental abuse and sexual infidelity cause among society’s most significant social and individual costs.
People do not recover from many such experiences. When that occurs, society loses a measure of who we are, morphing instead to an inferior alternative. Individuals fare even worse than society, rarely achieving or enjoying as they might otherwise have done.
But the government doesn’t regulate this kind of human choice, opting instead to leave the burden of some of society’s most challenging trauma solely on the shoulders of suffering spouses and disillusioned children.
If the government doesn’t regulate this kind of human conduct, what are some things that we do regulate? And what are some of the penalties of those acts?
The theory is that the government regulates human conduct that hurts others. If it doesn’t hurt another, we don’t regulate it. If it does hurt others, we’re supposed to have a penalty that is commensurate with the crime.
Often, it doesn’t turn out that way. The examples I list come from Utah. But, I’m confident, however, that most states will have similar penalties.
Fact scenarios:
–Someone kills a deer without a license —the penalty: 1 year unless it’s a big deer. Then, it’s for 5 years.
–Someone buys a license to hunt a deer but kills the deer in the wrong hunting section —the penalty: 5 years, for killing the deer in the wrong section of the state, even if he or she first found the deer in the right section but tracked it into the wrong section.
–A person is distracted while driving and kills someone — the penalty: 1 year.
–A person is drunk and causes an accident that injures but does not kill anyone — the penalty: 5 years.
–A person steals a rusted out car that is over twenty years old but still operable — the penalty: 15 years in prison.
–A person removes the registration sticker from one license plate and puts it on another license plate — the penalty: 15 years in prison.
–A baseball player at the plate gets angry at the umpire for a perceived missed call, and he hits the umpire in the stomach with his bat — the penalty: 5 years.
–A spouse beats his or her husband or wife senseless, using no weapon — the penalty: 6 months.
I have given only a few examples. Hopefully, they illustrate that what we punish as a society has no basis in reality to the harm that humans cause each other.
Why is it this way? Much of it has to do with the strength of one lobby over another. Sportsmen, for example, feel strongly about wildlife laws. So they persuade their legislators to make killing deer a serious crime. On the other hand, voices which speak in opposition to domestic violence and crimes against society’s most vulnerable aren’t that loud or demanding.
It’s all messed up.
Certainly, it illustrates that governments don’t do a good job of protecting its most vulnerable citizens when the citizenry doesn’t feel a collective duty to regulate itself.
Self-governance is more than just people who control its government. It’s understanding that people will never control their government so long as they refuse to control themselves.
Yours truly,
David O. Leavitt
