"Does a writer ever actually retire?" Just about every writer.
Get up in the morning, make so coffee, scan the news and the social media... Whuuuut?
Writers write so readers can read. So said fictional novelist William Forrester. The only problem with that statement for a small-market writer - that's me - is that readers won't read something if they don't know it's available. In a very real sense, writers write so they can pester people into reading. You can quote me on that.
Social media is an appropriate, if not fabulous, place to alert people that you are selling something. Appropriate because a lot of people visit social media. Not fabulous, because: first, a site may not contain enough, if any, of the demographic toward which your writing is directed and; second, there is a lot of stupid with internet access. A wise and intelligent psychologist warned me about that. But, I already knew.
Nevertheless, I will hardly turn down an opportunity to write, even when the audience is not entirely receptive. Even then...
Do you know - I'm just asking a question derived from a web site discussion involving normally intelligent people - that most public servants, including police officers, are thuggish morons (or moronic thugs, when the writer runs out of descriptive gas) unfit for any other work? Their jobs are cushy, their paychecks fat. They should stop depriving their fellow citizens of their constitutional rights, no matter what they are ordered to do. None of them are educated enough anyway for work in the private sector. It's a fact. I am confused, and need guidance.
To paraphrase fellow cancer patient and former NYPD cop and Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino, readers of Bikecopblog have figured out what is about to happen.
Are police officers just a bunch of dumb, uneducated thugs who can't find a real job, or constitutional scholars empowered to act independently of the legal system into which they fit? I'm just asking, so I know. I'm an old retired guy, and I'm trying to blend.
Where did all of this start? Apparently, there was a health inspector who arrived at a restaurant in California, on a mission. One of the shops on his route was serving take-out (because COVID) but, and this is the rub, the customers were not going immediately home like good little girls and boys and eating where the 'Rona can't get them. They broke open their food and ate in public.
I know, right? But, the health inspector has no jurisdiction over people sitting on a park bench eating take-out. So, he chose the next best venue - he threatened to close the restaurant unless the owner reigned in his customers.
Don't get bogged down in the details (like, really, that's the ditch you want to die in, Mr. Health Inspector?), because this is where the fun starts. The business owner is incensed, and parks his monster truck behind the inspector's car so he can't leave. "I can't work, you can't work" is approximately what was expressed. Well, guess who ends up getting invited to this little party?
Police officers circa 2020 are trained to handle this kind of situation, which essentially is "Don't take sides, keep them from killing each other. Enforce the law, when appropriate." It isn't like 1979, when I started. Then, I got three weeks of field training, worked on my own for a couple months and then went to a police academy. Now, officers get average 24 weeks of academy training and 16 weeks of field training before anyone would think to put them on the street alone.
The men and women who showed up to this call deescalated the situation. They talked sense to the guy. They suggested some reasonable alternatives for him to follow, including the restaurant guy asking the inspector's boss WTF? (Only, the boss apparently had ordered this.)
"Nope. Not listening. Too angry, too frustrated. End of my rope, etc."
This is where the social media experts, setting aside their primary jobs as immunologists and epidemiologists, dusted off their roles as constitutional scholars and went after the cops. And, where I asked my entirely reasonable question.
As we've discussed previously, while police officers are invested with considerable discretion, one of the things they are obligated to do is follow the lawful orders of their superiors. Just about every police department and sheriff's office has that in their manual. Failure to do so is called "insubordination" and is grounds for termination.
Are you with me so far? My friends on social media suggest that officers are thugs, brutes and morons because they are enforcing the rules set down by their state. Those laws are unconstitutional, they argue, and the police officers are too stupid, too comfortable in their mundane public sector jobs and too happy to lord it over their fellow citizens to recognize that they are one step away from loading people onto railroad cars.
This is something we've discussed, Jacobson, police powers and all of that. Remember the dude with his hat on backward, the guy telling other cops to refuse lawful orders?
Some of you are saying "But, the governor of Cali has no problem going to $300 an entree restaurants to celebrate his birthday. What the actual frick? Isn't this whole thing an invention of Dr. Fauci so he could get on TV?" I get that. It isn't about whether the governor is a dick, or if The Good Doctor is a showboat. It's about whether the law enables the governor to issue public health orders, and makes people respect them.
So, here is my question. Do people expect their cops - when they are not neutralizing active shooters and evacuating people in the presence of an RV bomb and almost getting killed in the process - to also be constitutional scholars able to make fine distinctions Johnnie Roberts and his eight goofballs can't agree on, when half the people you serve think you're an idiot, and the other half applaud you for enforcing rules many citizens think are not nearly strict enough?
Just about every officer I served with, or met along the way of my 40 years in the justice system, is a fabulous person trying to do a damn difficult job. If there is a solution to my quandary - let's hear it!
