Wow.
First, if you think I’m a youngin’, well thanks, but then you must be in your eighties, because I’m just coming to retirement age. You make me feel like I have a whole new life ahead of me. :)
Second, I don’t know where you got off thinking I was a hippie, just because I had some friends who were hippies. You should see my high school yearbook picture. Could not have been more of an ordinary, non-hippie geek. I only said I had friends who were hippies. I was also friends with greasers, jocks and prom queen types. That makes me neither a greaser, a jock or a ... well you get the idea.
And it was my hippie friends who were down on “the man,” like you are now. No police officer could do anything right. The whole system existed for no other reason but to oppress free spirits and stop the free flow of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Nothing could have been more repugnant to me, then or now. I have always been conservative. But as a Christian I wanted to make friends with people who were very different from me, because, then as now, I wanted be a light of the Gospel to them, if possible. So I think you’ve misunderstood about the hippie reference. In fact, you got it about as backwards as you could get it. But that happens. No skin off my nose.
As for my experience with law officers, I have almost nothing bad to report. They are not all “geniouses” but then neither am I. We’ve worked through a few rough spots, but nothing that would be out of the ordinary. And certainly nothing that would justify sweeping generalizations. Remember, its old-fashioned American individualism that lets conservatives like you and me see people as individuals, both the good ones and the bad ones, and that is a great advantage for us.
So yes, I know there are problems now, and they should get attention, but the bigger problem is it’s the culture that is supplying these people, and the culture is decadent. So you’re getting problems, not just with the police, but with all the vocations. It’s more noticeable with the police because they have an obvious form of power. But corruption happens everywhere now, in bureaucracies, at little league games, in church, you name it. Dishonesty, narcissism, devaluation of human life. You can’t really expect that to work.
And ultimately it won’t work. God’s law is like gravity. You can fight it for a moment, but back down you must come. It is what it is, and a culture that abandons God is a self-correcting problem. Either that culture will return to sanity, or it will self-destruct. That’s it.
Those were good thoughts you had Springer. If you are were in High School in the early ‘70’s and also not yet retired....you are a young’n! Sounds good! I was the largest supporter of anything LEO up until about 10-15 years ago. I have a 100% clean ‘criminal’ history record. No felonies, no misdemeanors I have never been arrested or spent any time behind bars. Zero. (I might have 6 or so speeding tickets in my life, that is it for bad boy behavior), so my negative feelings of disgust with the current out of control LEO situation does not come from any bad interactions I have had with them. It is 100% from TV, internet reports newspaper reports and that youtube place (yeah, I know, B/S in some of all of those also I’m sure). Sure there are good ones. REAL good ones! ‘Down the hill’ into the nearest town from up here in the mountains are the best group of local LEO guys you could ever want to meet and they are friendly, polite, professional and helpful. Everyone knows everyone up here. Quite a few good bull sessions at the 2 local Gun Shops and a few resturants with ‘em. THEY are disturbed with the abuses, the arrogance and the ‘us against them’ mentality that they hear about that are now rampant by LEO’s in other larger population, (about 800 pop. down in their area here) places in America, things that they have heard of just through the LEO grapevine let alone the main stream media. The wrong door raids, no knock invasions, wrongful shootings, wrongful use of force/beatdowns, killing dogs and the steroid thing. etc. etc. The same abuses that has my old butt so in a tizzy. The acceptance standards for new LEO’s now needs to be rolled back to a past era. The trainee instruction needs to be lengthened and they need to have a drug testing program in place. (If ballplayers go through it so should America’s LEO’s). I have heard LEO’s make next to nothing in yearly salary, 60-80K(???) per in the large cities, without overtime), and that is the prime reason why I can’t figure out why anyone would want to be LEO. The good ones, (and I include the ones who will NOT lie to cover up another ‘brothers’ criminal or unethical actions), deserve a lot more dough as far as I am concerned. Later.