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The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.
Thomas Sowell calls this the Vision of the Anointed. The first term of the equation is that people are generally good, so we can trust those who wield the levers of power. They have good intentions, or a good goal in mind. The second term of the equation is the average citizen isn’t smart enough to know what’s best for himself or the Country. This plays itself out, through the trickle down, in the interactions between average people and the front line of Government power, officers of the law.
The Deseret News puts it this way:
One of the common-sense rules of life can be summed up this way: Don’t mess with cops.
It doesn’t matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.
The End.
Or as this police officer puts it: I’m up here, and you’re down there.We are increasingly becoming a two class society, those who work for the government, and those who don’t. The results are predictable, even if we can’t always reason from the Vision of the Anointed to the man on the street.
Jericho Arkansas has a population of 174, and a police force of 7. The police force was apparently “seeded” by some form of grant money, and then left to fend for itself, financially. And how did the department fend for itself, making certain it has the revenue to pay salaries and expenses? By changing the town into a traffic ticket trap, both for outsiders and insiders. The situation has gotten so bad the Fire Chief protested having to appear in court twice to defend himself against tickets in the same day. The result? He was shot, in court, by one of the police officers. Yes, in court, by a police officer. In the back, no less.
Two nurses have been arrested and thrown in jail for anonymously reporting a doctor who was selling herbal supplements to patients in the hospital he was employed by. These aren’t your normal run-of-the-mill herbal supplements, this is true quackery stuff, special forms of water and all sorts of other nonsense. The doctor had been reported several times by other staff at the hospital, but the hospital administrator refused to take action. The nurses, fearing reprisals, reported the situation to the licensing board. The local sheriff used search warrants to uncover the identity of the two nurses, and took them to jail. They were then fired by the hospital administrator for blowing the whistle on this doctor, and they are now facing a criminal trial on thrid degree felony charges—all for reporting a doctor misusing his position. It turns out this might just be a police officer protecting his business interest through the long arm of the law. The sheriff is actually a partner in the herbal supplement business.
As the Christian Science Monitor puts it:
The arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., for “disorderly conduct” has set off a debate about racial profiling across America. But for civil libertarians, the incident on a front porch in Cambridge, Mass., raises a different issue: what they see as a subtle growth in police power since the war on drugs and 9/11, exemplified in so-called “attitude arrests” – when someone challenges or fails to show deference to police authority.
In Mr. Gates’s case, police described his behavior as “tumultuous,” but he broke no discernible laws. The Cambridge Police Department conceded as much when it dropped the charges, calling the incident “regrettable.” The local police union backs the arresting officer, who said he did nothing wrong.
“What I see as more significant [than race] is the phenomenon of persons being arrested who challenge the authority of police,” says David Rudovsky, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia. “It’s street punishment.”
Before worshiping at the altar of big government, we should consider all the consequences. We’re not just talking about huge deficits and financial ruin, we’re also talking about empowering the evil that lives inside all of us to come out and impact the life of every American in ways we can only begin to imagine.
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