LONG, LONG BEFORE ARIZONA'S LAW

All you need to understand the role of order in our lives is to come upon a busy intersection where the lights are out. Chaos. With the eventual arrival of a police officer, order is restored. We get on with our lives.

Funny thing about order, though, we tend to approve it only if it's on our terms. Order, yes, but customized to our needs. Otherwise we have other names for it. Authoritarian, tyranny, fascism. But now what if we are told that the very concept of order itself is simply a cosmic illusion?

This is what string theorists like Erick Verlinde of the University if Amsterdam are suggesting. Newton's old dependable law of gravity may not be a law but "simply a byproduct of nature's propensity to maximize disorder."

While cosmologists wrestle with this next chapter in the design vs disorder argument, the issue is being played out every day in our city streets. Usually at night. Usually without press coverage. Usually in poorer, minority neighborhoods. It's the stop-and-search protocol of our large-city police departments, a protocol that's been around long before the Arizona immigrant law hit the headlines.

Consider just one small neighborhood in just the one New York borough of Brooklyn over just the last 4 years. The New York Times reports 52,000 separate stop-and-search events. On darkened streets...in alleyways... in apartment building entrances...in parked cars.

Why is this not reported more in the press...? Well, the residents aren't that visible, the police aren't that willing, and the public aren't that interested. Order in big cities really means: Keep me safe, and I don't need to know how you do it!

Local college campuses like to study the sociological/economic/racial cause-and-effect of these events. Their libraries overflow with these documents. No one reads them, though. Not the police, nor the residents, nor even the lawyers who occasionally envision class-action suits. Frankly, in most cases the stop-and-search was totally justified. When you live near the jungle, there's little time for writing about how we are surviving it. For most, it quietly becomes a fait accompli, thank God, end of analysis!

New York, Chicago and Tuscon aren't much like the Eden that Genesis speaks of. But then Cain slew Abel, and other Cains have been loose ever since. So if it takes Wyatt Earps to bring order to what's left of Eden, seems like there are few prophets to protest. Lets get back to summer baseball, where order comes a whole lot easier...