My lengthy experience with the unforgiving, uncompromising, unaccommodating, unfailing, unmanning, unflinching, uniform court system has, I think, made me a more forgiving, compassionate person. This is deeply, deeply troubling, because that means the System has succeeded, though in a rather roundabout way.
I'm much more likely, now that I've faced the unwavering Machine, to recognize the individuality of the transgressor, and see that, in a similar circumstance, I might proceed the same way. The very nature (as we have built it) of the Beast does not permit it to take individuality into account. The System is all-encompassing, all-sweeping, all-binding, all-powerful, and we have made it that way. Laws do not treat people as people. Laws treat people as units or cogs in the vast Combine of civilized society. Operated and oiled by a relatively tiny plutocracy, the rest of the flock becomes as un-unique as any sheep in an enormous flock. The sheep knows he is One, but when viewed from above, he's no more than a wool-producing, self-warming blob, just like all the rest.
Laws, so convoluted throughout an entire history of overlapping and overlapping, adding and adding--never taking away, just adding more to countermand--have stripped the majority of people of their rights as individuals. Ironically, our uniquely identifying fingerprints are gobbled up and stored in the blind memory of the Machine.
Sadly, there is no way to fight the System. You can't outsmart omnipotence. All one can do to try to scrape away the wool that they've encouraged us to hide behind is to understand the looming presence of that which we've eagerly helped to build. All one can do is try to avoid capture in the cold, impersonal, mechanized grip of the Combine. And to do that, one must blend into the surrounding foliage and hope the law enforcers--the power-corrupted, trigger-happy, duped minions--don't peer with squinty, dead-serious eyes into your hiding place. Because they will get you. The Indian never wins. The revolutionary always succumbs to the sucking strength of power and becomes the Pig.