Creativity Quote by Ruben Blades

Blades lands this line like a punchy chorus: spare, direct, and quietly damning. On the surface it reads as pragmatic career logic, but the real target is a political environment so hollowed out that even the idea of “professional duty” becomes theater. If there’s “no law,” then a lawyer isn’t a defender of rights; he’s window dressing for power. The sentence refuses the comforting myth that institutions keep working just because people keep showing up.

The phrasing matters. “Doesn’t make sense” is almost casual, the language of everyday decision-making, which makes the indictment sharper. He isn’t grandstanding about tyranny; he’s describing a system so broken it fails a basic common-sense test. That understatement is the subtext: when the rule of law collapses, moral outrage is less useful than clarity about complicity. Staying on as a lawyer in lawless conditions risks becoming part of the choreography that helps authoritarianism look procedural.

Contextually, Blades is never just a musician delivering platitudes; his public persona has long braided art with civic critique, from salsa narratives about working life to direct political engagement in Panama. This line fits that tradition: it treats legality not as a costume but as infrastructure. It also doubles as a broader warning to professionals in compromised systems - judges, journalists, bureaucrats - that neutrality can become collaboration when the baseline rules are gone. The bite is in the implied ultimatum: either there is law, or there is only power pretending to be law.