rules – The Zion Chronicle

Despite how the media and students are portraying the situation, the Bingham High dress code fiasco isn’t about sexuality nor is it about self-expression despite what this article in the Standard Examiner suggests.

They got their spin from the girl who led the protest walkout on Monday. She said this:

I understand having a dress code but when it comes down to a dance that’s our time to be rewarded for being good students and we should be able to express ourselves.

She’s trying to claim self expression but notice that there is no complaint about the dress code itself. “She understands having a dress code” and she makes no claim that its too restrictive or unreasonable. She simply wishes that it would be ignored for the dance despite the fact that the school did everything to make sure that students understood the dress code for the dance.

It’s amazing how many rules we have to govern everything we do. We took the family to the swimming pool today and were surprised at how few people there were there – until we learned that the pool had run out of plastic diaper covers, which are now required in addition to swim diapers after the rounds of sickness last year. Later in the day we had to return an ink cartridge that was bad and we learned about how strict the store policy is on returning ink.

In both cases the rules make sense when you understand why they were made, but it got me wondering if we would need all these rules if people would just be honest, reasonable, and responsible for their own actions. Sometimes it seems that many and strict rules or policies tend to encourage us to turn off our brains (especially for those who are low in the rule enforcement hierarchy) and abandon common sense or even simple decency (neither of those things happened today).