Why do we let our legislators, both state and federal, rewrite the same laws over and over? And instead of replacing the old tired version with the shiny new one, it gets added to the top of an insurmountably tall stack of paper work.

Here’s your example: God said to Moses, “Thou shalt not kill.” This, normally, would stand on its own merit. Right? No. Not even close. By federal law, you can kill as many people as you can get away with, unless you cross a state line to do it, or if you hate the person you are killing. Then you are in trouble. By state law, you can’t go around killing folks. Furthermore, if you kill someone with your car, or with a gun, or by blunt instrument, or by knife, or by torture, each of these dead people passed away under different laws, though I submit to you, they’re each equally dead. Unless you kill the person before they’re quite born yet, then they don’t qualify as a dead person at all, so the law protects you.

Our lawmakers take up space and get paid, to re-crush these same big rocks into little rocks over and over, then glue them back into big rocks, for the sole purpose of breaking them again, and yet we keep finding new, more inventive ways of killing each other, and these laws don’t seem to be stopping us.

This is the most basic example I could come up with to illustrate a growing problem. Passing new laws while we’re unable or unwilling to enforce the old ones, looks likes the W.P.A. all over again, but with Armani suits and limousines this time. It’s still the same old bad idea.

Esther Ramos