When the Exceptions to the Rule Become the Rule Itself

I'm no rule follower but they exist for reasons...

“What is your policy concerning umbrellas in the park?”

My new Front of House second in command is going over my approach to problems she has confronted in past years. There are a lot of park rules (especially since a shooting happened in the park a couple of years ago which caused a bunch of lockdown measures in the same way that the TSA became a police state due to one fucking idiot trying to smuggle a shoe bomb after 9/11). Overreaction is the American way so her questions make a sad sort of sense.

“The park policy is pretty clear. No umbrellas are allowed, right?”

“Yes. Yes, but people get them past security all the time.”

“Fair enough. My policy is no exceptions. If the rule is ‘no umbrellas’ then we don’t allow umbrellas. As soon as you start making exceptions to such a basic rule, the exceptions become the rule.”

“So, you don’t make any exceptions to park rules?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. There are always exceptions. Maybe an albino brings in an umbrella because the very touch of sun will melt them into a blistery goo. We’ll make that exception. For the most part and in 99% of the cases, you better have a really good reason to become an exception.”

As a bona fide natural born contrarian, my take on rules has never been consistent. A personal motto has been “Own the rules so you can break them.” This is not exactly the approach required when dealing with thousands of visitors to one of the largest outdoor concert venues in Chicago. When I taught seventh and eighth graders in the nineties, my policy for the kids was to encourage them to break the rules but accept the consequences if they get caught. No whining when you get busted, no protestations. You try to get around things and better be as gracious when losing as you are when winning.

The hope was that these kids who were going to break the rules anyway (southwest side of Chicago, lots of gang affiliation, teenagers) would learn to understand that sometimes you get nabbed and, when you do, try not to make it worse.

When it comes to managing the front of house, forty-five ushers, coordinating with security, off duty officers, park facilities, and various producers, I can’t afford to be as contrarian. Everyone looks to find the exceptions so exceptions have to be the rarity. The real question is who is empowered to make the exceptions?

Even in the park this question is complicated.

“What if an Ops Manager or Head of Security decides someone can bring their umbrella in the park? Either the person just complains so much about it that they let it pass or they’re convincing enough to get an allowance? What do we do then?”

“Play it by ear, I suppose. Wing it and then have a conversation with those folks to see where they see the exceptions and then reconfigure. At some point, if anybody can grant the exception, then eventually the rule is meaningless.”

The complex web of exceptions granted by various institutions, groups, and, in the case of Florida and Texas, states that elevate themselves to make a rule and then ignore the rule in certain cases is not as simple as Millennium Park festivals. The religious right really want there to be no exceptions to a ban on abortions and the progressive left want there to no restriction whatsoever—both have an all or nothing paradigm in mind. No one agrees on who gets to determine the exceptions and what level of pregnancy or how it happened justifies them. Thus, we are at an impasse.

The concept of the Patriarchy is seeped with this sort of complexity—the vast majority of men in America are not in power, make as much or less than the average woman, and have higher incarceration and suicides rates than women but the exceptions to this reality (billionaires) make so much more money and have so much power that it tends to tip the scale making those exceptions the rule. No feminist is using the guy who works as an Amazon driver as an example of the Patriarchy—they use Bezos because his wealth and power is so ridiculously huge. He is the exception and is the metric used to determine the existence of something that sounds a bit like a 80’s hard rock band.

The Rule: if someone commits a crime, they will be tried, convicted, and punished.
The Exception: wealthy people can game this very system and avoid most of it.
The Result: some push for higher accountability for the rich and others push for far more exceptions that include poverty, potential mental illness, and historical marginalization so the system stays broken.

The Rule: certain hateful words that play into historical stereotypes should not be uttered.
The Exception: the very people these words describe in the most egregious and pernicious ways get to utter them.
The Result: white suburban kids get in serious trouble for using words they hear in popular music and popular musicians are somehow allowed to use homophobic and misogynistic slurs with impunity thus making a joke of the very cause of hate speech.

The Rule: we must respect an individuals desire to self identify.
The Exception: except for race, class, age, weight, political affiliation, and opinion regarding the MCU.
The Result: self identification only serves a tiny slice of people in a very limited category and the vast majority of people are not allowed the same respect for self identification.

Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Helen Keller, Harvey Weinstein, Margaret Thatcher, Tom Cruise, Albert Einstein, George Floyd, Anya Taylor-Joy, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Paul Reubens, Kanye West, Gloria Steinem, and those famous and infamous people in the world are the exceptions to the rule that most of us are neither amazingly successful, figures of martyrdom, or overwhelmingly condemned. These exceptions are simply agreed upon and no one is in a position to grant them. Their existence is the case of exceptions proving the rule because they are so rare.

“What about the ushers using their phones when on shift?”

“Fuck that. No exceptions on that one. That’s like a meth addict telling you he isn’t addicted but just needs to have his meth on him just in case. Once that phone comes out, we might as well count that usher out of the game.”