Is this what life in America will be like going forward?
If President Barack Obama can't get his way with Congress, he takes action by executive order. If United Auto Workers can't get a foothold at Volkswagen with an up-and-down vote of employees, it plots with the willing car maker to make the union the representative of workers at the plant anyway. If a group of people don't like the decisions made by grand juries, they cry foul and perpetrate violence.
The current presidential administration has taken this 180-degree turn on the innate fairness Americans used to be able to count on to a new level, but, if we're honest, we've all seen it coming.
We see it in the Little League baseball dad who leaves the stands to argue with the 17-year-old umpire -- who is being paid $10 a game -- about the "out" call the umpire made on his 7-year-old son.
We see it in the mom who, until now, hasn't had much interest in her fifth-grade daughter's work but who marches directly into the classroom and confronts the teacher who had dared to give her child a "D" on a project.
We see it in the organizations which, not satisfied to take public prayers out of schools, sue to keep a child from reading a Bible during a free reading period or to prevent a child from naming Jesus as the most influential person in their life because either action might unnecessarily influence another child.
Umpires, teachers and school systems used to be trusted that they would do their utmost to be fair to each person with whom they dealt. Now, increasingly, fairness is out, and special privilege is in.
What are parents, who still believe in fairness, to teach their children and what are the children to do when they learn special privilege gets you a lot further than fairness?
Obama's recent action in allowing nearly 5 million illegal immigrants to stay in the country is hardly his first foray in trying to get around Congress and get his own way.
Among other things, through executive actions or orders, he raised the minimum wage for people working under new federal service contracts, ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, capped the payments of student-loan borrowers, appointed a record number of unanswerable czars, rewrote rules for overtime pay for certain workers, increased efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions through environmental regulations, gave states waivers from federal mandates if they agreed to education overhauls, allowed states to modify welfare work requirements, enacted 23 measures toward curbing gun violence, ordered federal agencies to consider climate change in all international development programs and frequently changed and amended his own Affordable Care Act.
Of course other presidents have used executive actions but none with the scale, the far-reaching consequences and the deliberate skirting of Congress actions of Obama.
Remember, after all, his infamous statement to French President Francois Hollande: "That's the good thing about being president. I can do anything I want."
As for the UAW, a 712-626 vote against unionization at the VW plant in February and an agreement it had to wait a year to organize again meant nothing. Within a month, the union was in talks with VW in Germany and supposedly secured an agreement for recognition. Now, citing the dubious signing of membership cards and actions that may have violated the National Labor Relations Acts, the union is declaring it has the right to represent workers.
Such bullying, we'll-do-what-we-want tactics only prove the reticence of Tennessee lawmakers to have the UAW involved at the plant.
And in the recent grand jury decisions to not indict two white policeman who, in the line of duty, killed black men, violence does not bring back the dead, poisons the water for reasonable talk, turns the spotlight back on the law-breakers and mocks the good that meaningful protest can have.
Children will learn about the unfairness of life soon enough -- as soon as the last cookie is divided into two slightly uneven pieces -- but that shouldn't mean we give up on it in the light of actions others take. If parents are fair and equitable, if their punishments fit the behaviors, if children learn they can't always have what they want, children will learn fairness.
Then, if they can model it and ... well, at least there's hope for a different future.