If you want to fly, you don't do it by wishing, jumping higher, or beating the earth into submission till it acquiesces and turns gravity off for you. You do it by finding a way within the laws of nature to create sufficient lift to overbalance the force of gravity. It doesn't matter whether we think that we should have the right to fly simply because we will it, or that we should have the right to fly because we've built up legs strong enough to jump really high. The universe doesn't change it's laws to fit our moral convictions. Sometimes we can get what we want without bending from our convictions, but that's either because our convictions match the universal laws that govern what we want, or because we do a lot of extra work. A better way to get what you want is to figure out the laws surrounding it, and working with them.

One thing I'd really like to figure out are the laws that would prevent my son from playing with my computer. Pretty much every time I'm out of the room for more than a few seconds, he hops up on my chair and starts banging away at the keyboard. I've installed a password protected screen saver which I activate whenever I leave the room to keep him from accidentally deleting a hard drive or something. So I've figured out how to get that part of what I want--keeping my computer safe from baby accidents--but I still don't know how to get him to stop playing with it. And he can still change my monitor settings (fortunately, he doesn't do that often).

At first, after he didn't respond to being told "no", I tried slapping his hand. It didn't stop him (my mom tells me I was the same when I was a child), I hated doing it, and he started hitting back. It made no difference that I thought he should respond to hand slaps by stopping doing naughty things with his hands. He didn't, and I had to work with that reality. So now he goes into time out. That doesn't stop him either, but I don't mind doing it, and he doesn't put me in time out in response. And I do get a minute or two of peace. Maybe someday I'll find a more effective method.