Knowing when to break the rules

The pharisees must have dealt with insecurity and depression.  That’s the only cause I can think of for such blatant ignorance in the face of common sense for a group of people to execute a man for such grievous crimes as healing a sick man when he was supposed to be in church. 

A quick flip through the pages of the Gospels suggests the narrative favored a larger-than-life perspective for these earnest believers.  Really, how could anyone be that stupid?  Well…

Off Hope Cove, on the Devon coast, a crew of strong, experienced men has saved a girl’s life with minutes to spare, only to find itself “disciplined” because the only boat available was classified as an “additional facility awaiting inspection”. Earlier and farther inland, see two more strong men standing helpless in their luminous Police Community Support uniforms, wittering into radios because they lacked the correct certificates to try to rescue a drowning boy.

That’s an anecdote from a recent Times Online articleabout bureaucracy (if you can ignore the ad for the Obama thong, and boy don’t I wish I were kidding).  While experiences like this one are, I believe, more uncommon than not, the writer manages unearth four more such stories of increasing nonsensical frustration.  Really, people can be pretty stupid. 

I have had the pleasure of not meeting many pharisees.  There are those that live by the book to a fault, but there are those whose commitment to protocol takes on a more disingenuous candor.  They could learn a little from the terse profundity offered in the article’s conclusion:

Real training lays down a framework of expertise and safety not to prevent initiative, but to free it. If you really know the rules and understand their purpose, you can judge when to make an exception and break them.

Although, we are talking about a segment of personalities for whom sense is not so common.