When the Law Comes the Wrong Way

This morning, my friend and I were riding down a one-way street. A big arrow on the road pointed our direction, like a polite suggestion everyone had agreed to follow. It’s simple: you go this way, I go this way, nobody crashes.

Then, from the opposite direction, a scooter came toward us. It didn’t creep or hesitate. It drove like it owned the road—which, in a way, it thought it did. Right on the front was a neat little sticker: ADVOCATE.

I stopped. Because sometimes rules still work on your hands before they work on your brain.

He stopped too. He looked at us, annoyed, like we were a math problem that had suddenly appeared in his way.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

My friend said, politely, “This is a one-way. You’re coming from the wrong side.”

A tea-seller watching from the sidewalk—a kind of street-corner judge—chimed in, “Oh, he always comes this way. Every day.”

Always.
As in, “My habit is stronger than your sign.”
As in, “The real rule is the one I make up as I go.”

The advocate didn’t deny it. He didn’t say sorry. He just stood there, wrapped in a quiet, unshakable idea: knowing the law is much more important than following the law.

It was like watching a firefighter play with matches.

See, for most of us, driving the wrong way is called “being reckless.”
But for some, it’s just a “creative interpretation.”

Recklessness, after all, depends on your mood.
Safety is just a suggestion.
And endangering people? Well, that’s only real if you don’t have a law degree.

The road, of course, never went to law school.
It doesn’t read stickers.
It doesn’t care about your job title.
Concrete doesn’t respect your confidence.

Yet some people drive as if the traffic lights will turn green out of sheer politeness.

What stuck with me wasn’t that he broke the rule. People break rules all the time.
It was his attitude—the calm, cozy certainty that laws are not for him, but for other people. That rules are like umbrellas for the rain, and he’s somehow always indoors.

We rode away, and it hit me:
The most dangerous person on the road isn’t the one who doesn’t know the rules.
It’s the one who knows them… and believes they’re optional for smart people like him.

Because when the law itself starts driving the wrong way, it doesn’t look powerful anymore.

It just looks like arrogance with a bumper sticker.