Today

So, I have decided to get back into this. I used to have 20 or 30 people (it's a ton, I know) read my deepest thoughts! Usually about dating, since I was obsessed with that in high school. This blog will probably be a different story, not that I have somehow lost my appreciation for women but that they are not my primary pursuit in life.
At least, I hope I've grown up since high school.

I'm a college student, and since many of you who will end up reading this likely know that, I'll tell you a little bit more that you might not know.
I get terribly nervous speaking in public sometimes, and I say stupid things, which is obviously something I am working on, but when I'm writing I have a clarity that doesn't really come out in my speech. I have a much better vocabulary, for instance, and I tend to look back and assess what I've said before I declare my final answer, Jeopardy-style. So, on the whole, you could say that I am a different person behind the keyboard, but I prefer thinking of myself as better prepared for emotional depth behind the keyboard. I tend to observe others before jumping in to conversation, but when I do, I do so boisterously and whole-heartedly. But, I also save most of my thoughts for myself and rarely speak them blatantly.

I am fairly far away at college, farther away than I have ever permanently lived from my original home, but that really doesn't affect me like it does some of the others. I'm older, and I've been through this before.

Despite the mood of this particular entry, I am seldom a completely serious person. I prefer satire to sophistication, any day. (Hey, I just came up with that myself; it's pretty catchy)

I think I'll try to motivate myself to update the joke of the week and a few little things I read about or hear about on the sidebar over there, but no promises. I'll also try to update this blog about 4 times a week. Wish me luck.

So, aside from this little intro, I leave you with a question. One that I actually wrote a paper on just today.

Does the law encourage people to be good?

I ponder this because of something I caught myself doing, today.
I caught myself doing homework.
Now, this may not seem like an over-the-top suggestion, but let's face it, I coasted through high school. I passed because I get good test grades, and I barely ever did my homework.
So, now that I am in college, I realize this isn't exactly an option. Fortunately, I realized it without suffering the consequences, which gives me hope for my psychological state.
The correlation between these two, however, is this:
Do I do my homework because I want to learn or because I don't want to fail my classes?
Do people obey the law because they want to be good people, or because they don't want to suffer the consequences of breaking the law?

If I do my homework to get good grades, then it follows that whenever an assignment is not necessary for my grade, I don't do it.
If I slow down in a school zone because I know cops patrol school zones (you KNOW you do this, too) then it follows that if they took away the signs, I would speed by schools at 4:00 and kill people daily.

People in American society, and I assume other societies as well, see laws as obstacles, instead of good things. Why are there laws? Because laws support the ideal life of the human race. They prevent chaos and immorality because living without chaos and immorality is the way that humans were designed to live. But teaching that if you break a law, you will be punished almost encourages us to believe that if we can avoid the law and still get what we want, it is okay. If, instead, we propagated the idea that by following the law we do a good service to ourselves and others, we psychologically train people to see the law as a good thing.

I would rather have good people who obeyed the law than bad people who were restrained from bad deeds by the law. Wouldn't you?

That's all I have to say about that.