Flags and Such.

I’m a racist.  There, it’s out on the table.  When I am out on the road, I purposefully chose to not spend my money at fuel stops that are owned and run by Indians.  I do so out of choice, because that’s my right.  It has been my experience that most establishments that are run by Indians are not up to par with my expectations for cleanliness and service.  So I chose not to do business with those establishments.  It’s my right, I make that decision.  When I look for good BBQ, I purposefully look for establishments that are owned and run by black people.  I do so because it has been my experience that for the most part, black people make a mean ass BBQ—end of story.   When I am looking for help around the house in the form of manual labor, I deliberately seek out employees of Mexican heritage.  I do so because it has been my general experience that they work hard, don’t complain, they show up for work on time, and get the job done.  I also get on pretty well with Mexicans- so I chose to hire them.  Do these things make me a racist?  By the definition; “A person who believes one race is superior to another”. It makes me a racist because I believe that black people are better at (among other things) cooking BBQ, Jews excel at banking and finances, Mexicans are more physically built for tolerating working in the hot sun because of the climate they hail from.  And yes, I am generally unimpressed by the hygiene

standards that I have encountered with folks from India.  So I guess that makes me a big fat cracker racist.

It would be delusional to try to convince yourself that there is such a thing as a person who is not racist to some extent.  General life experiences will mold your thoughts and feelings about different groups of people.  That’s just the way things are.  I am sure that we all harbor some resentment somewhere about something.  Some people resent entire races based on skin color, nationality, sexual preferences, and more people have been systematically slaughtered throughout history because they do not share beliefs in the same deity.  The divide in the United States between black and white has a long and ugly history.  It is where we see and hear the most about racism in the news and in our conversations.  Racism has again been brought to the forefront of our lives by a wicked act in one of our oldest and most beautiful cities.  Now, I see my friends and neighbors pointing at a flag in South Carolina while screaming “RACISM!”.   It’s this cry of “racism” and what it really implies, that I want to address.

I don’t want to even discuss the heritage of the Southern Cross flag.  I will acknowledge that it was used in our Civil War by the Confederacy.  It represented the mindset that black people were property and not human.  Yep, it was carried by people who fought and died for a very backward and distorted viewpoint of other human beings.  Presently that battle standard is on display in front of the State Capitol in South Carolina and it is causing a media firestorm.  Countless pundits and officials have been propped up in front of cameras to call for the flag to be brought down.  They talk about how demeaning it is and how it only serves as a reminder of the hatred of the slavery and Civil War.  “It’s insensitive” I have been hearing over and over again.  “It flies in the face of the entire black community to fly the Confederate flag over the state capitol…..”   I disagree.

The thing that we keep seeing over and over again: “Confederate Flag still flying over South Carolina State Capitol”.  Usually accompanied by a carefully cropped pictures like these:

Usually the text of those articles stops just shy of calling Law Makers and residents of the state “Racist Cracker Klansmen”, but it sure wants to imply it.  People are asking how it is possible in this day and age that we are flying such a symbol of hatred over a government building…..well we’re not.

Here is the image that the media does not show you:

The Northern Virginia Battle Flag does indeed fly AT the state capitol building.  It flies over a war memorial that is dedicated to soldiers who paid the ultimate price in one of our bloodiest wars.  It does NOT fly over the State buildings as the media would have you believe.   In fact, because the flag is not actually flying over a government building, it requires a legislative vote just to lower it to half staff.   So despite what you are being told, the calls from the media are nothing short of demands to desecrate a war memorial to fallen soldiers. Think about that long and hard for a minute because history will quickly tell you what comes next.  We start with the flag, we find it offensive, so we rip it down.  Well the rest of the memorial is still there—it also offends me, so we should just take it out.  Well now that I think about it, aren’t we spending tons of money every year to keep a museum open at Gettysburg? 

Good lord, this only serves as a reminder of all the hatred.  It hurts my feelings so we should stop spending federal dollars on such a thing.  Let’s close the doors.  Hell, we should probably go ahead and plow over the battlefield there and build a strip mall because such things only serve as a reminder-and that hurts my feelings.

COMING SOON: STARBUCKS!

Well, now that we have cleansed our society of the remind----OH WAIT, we have that other thing.  All those pesky Civil War graveyards, with markers and tombstones.  Well they represent hatred and slavery right?  We certainly can’t have all those graves out in plain sight for our children to see.  We really do need to just plow those over and build some low income housing there.  It would be a much more efficient use of the space and we would not have to have all those stones there reminding us—serving as beacons of hate.  Right? 

If you think I am being sarcastic, this is what people are talking about doing.  This is where it leads.  You are currently talking openly about desecrating a war memorial.  Where do you think that slope really leads?  What we are doing is blaming the actions of one sick individual on a war memorial to fallen soldiers, and I don't agree with that.  So if it makes you feel better to label me a racist because I don’t agree that it’s a good idea to start burning flags in South Carolina—go ahead, I guess I’m a racist.

Good Cop, Bad Cop.

Since people first came together in groups around campfires, there has been the problem of crime.   By it’s very nature, society begets criminals.  Some people just want to take advantage of other people.  It’s the way things are, it’s the way things have always been.  We learned long ago, that we can not rely on people to police their own behavior, so the idea was born of selecting a chosen few from among the masses to decide what rules we should follow as a society.  They were then tasked with enforcing those rules.   We try to carefully chose the most upstanding people among us to be the enforcers of our rules.  But despite our best efforts and intentions, like anything else, there has never been a way to perfect this process.   History has proven time and again that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Our law enforcers are not exempt from these rules.  They are the rules of the universe and that’s the way it is.  We try our best to weed out the corrupt, but the process can sometimes be difficult despite our best intentions.

You don’t have to turn far these days to see the headlines, webposts, tweets and newscasts screaming about the latest Police Officer being accused of use of excessive force or abuse of authority or even outright corruption.  Yes it’s happening.  It has been happening since the dawn of society.  There have and always will be people who abuse the authority vested in them by the rest of society.  As a Republican society, it is our duty to point out these people, call them out and do our best to weed them out of the positions of authority.  It is our responsibility as the harbingers of free speech to point these things out whenever we can.  Our founding fathers built our Constitution around this very principle. They thought so fiercely about it, that they made sure that the very first amendment to our Constitution protected the right to call out our elected and appointed representatives.

In our society, our media is a for profit business.  As such, the competition for advertising revenue is pretty fierce.  The historic trend in media has always been to look at what the most successful guy is doing and steal his ideas.  Right now, the most successful trend in media appears to be pointing out the abuse and corruption in our law enforcement and bringing it out into the light.  This attention is probably long overdue.  For way too long, our media has allowed too many incidents of abuse to fall by the wayside without the attention it deserves.  For some time, the media has had no interest in covering such events and have been more interested in making sure they keep up with their competition.  But now, the demand has come for stories about Police abuse, especially if we can mix some racial stuff in there with it to stir it up a bit.   If it’s a story about a white cop appearing to use excessive force with a black person, it’s going to sell.  It’s the story of the week.  That is just the trend in media right now.  News agencies appear to be attempting to make up for years of ignoring these stories by bombarding us with as many as they can, as fast as they can find them. 

While I absolutely applaud and approve of any effort to expose and remove any people from positions of authority who are abusive and corrupt, I have been starting to take exception to some of the stuff I am seeing floating around, especially on the internet where there is no standard for fact checking or accuracy in what people post and report. I see stuff posted every day that is postured like a news story, but lacks any actual quotes from witnesses or officials.  There is no evidence that the author ever asked for, or looked at any official reports. These posts are always chocked full of conjecture and hearsay and a whole lot of opinion, but usually pretty sparse on actual facts.  The end result of this is a lot of misinformation and innuendo being spread like a fire around corners of the internet.  I see way too many people that I respect and admire taking these so called reports as absolute fact without considering the source of the information.  I love the freedom and instant access of information that the internet provides, but these are the kinds of things that lead to conviction and sentencing of an accused before our society ever has a chance to give them their due process.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS ENTIRELY OPINION BASED SOLELY ON MY EXPERIENCE IN MY PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE.

(Not to be confused with websites pretending to be actual news outlets since this is a blog based entirely on my personal opinions)

As the “wife of a Police Officer”, I have had many opportunities over the years to see how much of the law enforcement process works.  I will state without hesitation that there are absolutely corrupt and abusive people in law enforcement that should not be where they are.  We need to weed them out for sure.  But there is something else that you are not seeing.  Something that I see every single day.  Something that will happen a hundred or a thousand times today in cities across the country.  It happens in every law enforcement agency in the United States with so much regularity that it becomes just another activity.  It goes mostly unnoticed and unmentioned.  It’s usually covered up by the perpetrators and hidden from view by the brothers on the thin blue line.  They will fiercely protect a fellow officer and lie about it to keep their secret.  If you ask about it, most officers will just shrug and give you a stupid look and turn away or change the conversation.

Every single day, Officers will dig into their own pockets to use their money to help someone in need.  They will buy food for a hungry person.  They will rent a hotel room for a homeless mother who has no food for her three children.  They will use their own time and resources to do their best to make sure she has some kind of foothold, any kind of foothold to get her started on the road to self reliance.  Officers will stop and help someone change a tire.  They will help someone cross the street, carry groceries for an elderly person despite the 45 pound gun belt they are already dragging on their hips.  They will dig clothes out of their own closet to bring to people at a hidden homeless camp in the woods because they know that the weather is about to turn.  They will take up a donation among the squad of underpaid road patrol officers to purchase a bicycle for an autistic boy because his parents are both struggling to pay the bills.  On his way home, that officer is going to bring a teddy bear that he purchased with his own money to a young boy at the hospital that was in a serious car accident yesterday.  There won't be any cameras there for that.  If there are, he will turn away and come back later after they leave.  It has been my experience that this kind of activity happens with far more frequency than abuse of authority.  I have personally witnessed these things hundreds of times, but pictures of an Officer fixing a tire apparently does not sell newspapers. That officer will go home at the end of a 12 hour shift, and turn on the news to a story about another officer abusing their authority, and they will sit and shake their head with the rest of us.  

With the sensory bombardment of “Cops being bad” it becomes very easy to allow ourselves to become enraged about the abuse of authority.  We should be enraged when it happens.  We should also reserve ourselves to responding with the appropriate jurisprudence for the situation. Bad people do bad things.  Sometimes good people do bad things. We need to remember that the media is in the business of selling us stuff. They are going to put their best spin on it to get us to buy it.  Rage is a pretty strong sales tactic and the media loves to use it.  It starts to become easy after a while to become jaded to all persons tasked with law enforcement positions. Especially if all we are seeing is stories of abuse repeated indefinitely only to be broken by the occasional commercial attempting to sell you the latest trendy prescription medication.  It becomes hard to remember that not only are Cops people too, they are almost invariably the people who go out of their way to help the guy next to them when there is no reward or gain in it for themselves.

So the next time that you are sitting in front of the television and you see a story come on about a Police Officer accused of using excessive force on someone, being corrupt or even being accused of general maleficence; just remember, there are probably dozens of law enforcement professionals watching the same story in front of their own TV's shaking their heads with you.  It is incredibly demoralizing for them because they know that not only does it cast a negative light on their entire profession, but it also washes over anything positive they have striven to silently achieve while no one was looking. 

Meaghan

Her name was Meaghan.  She was going into shock.  I was standing on the side of the road in northern Alabama holding her up so that she did not fall down again and hurt herself.  I urged her to sit down on a safe area off the side of the road and stood up thinking I should run to the truck to fetch a blanket.  Just minutes earlier, I had been following her and several other drivers down Highway 72 near Athens Alabama.   There was another semi in front of me so my forward visibility was somewhat obscured.  Because of this, I had been giving the truck plenty of room in case we needed to stop in a hurry.  Sure enough, without warning, I saw the two white cars in front of the semi flip end over end several times.  They had made contact at high speed in the middle of the roadway.  Plastic and glass rained down on the pavement and the smell of burning rubber filled the air.  

The truck driver in front of me and I both had the same reaction.  We braked as safely as possible and pulled off the right side of the road.  As I was slowing down, my mind raced to remember where I had stored my medical kit.  I cursed out loud when  suddenly remembered that I had gotten lazy about it and stopped carrying one just over 2 years ago.  As my truck glided to a crawl, my left hand instinctively reached down to unlatch the fire extinguisher that I keep there.  I glanced up and surveyed the situation quickly.  There was no immediate indications of a fuel spill or a fire.  I made a quick decision and spared some seconds to forgo the extinguisher for now.   This was far from the first time I had witnessed such and event, and I knew that time could be pretty critical right now.

As the air brakes popped in the two trucks, we were both out and on our feet in a full run before our engines fully shut down. There were also people already streaming in from several directions out of the businesses that lined the side of the road.  The driver in front of me veered left to the minivan that had landed in the middle of the median on its side.  Most of the other bystanders were also running in that direction.  So I turned my attention to the other vehicle.  The white Hyundai had rolled at least once and had veered off the right side of the road and about 150 yards down a pretty steep embankment.  Thankfully, it had landed on its wheels.  As I ran towards the car, a much younger man ran past me and down to the vehicle.  As we made our way down the slippery grass slope, a young lady exited the drivers side of the car and promptly fell down.  The young man in front of me reached her first and helped her up.  As they attempted to distance themselves from the wrecked Hyundai, they both took another tumble together.  I reached out and grabbed the young lady by the arm as we both asked her frantically: “Is there anyone else in the car?”  “N-N-No”.  She replied through her sobs. 

I pulled the young girl up to the shoulder with the young man right behind her.  He was a bit frantic and wanted to drag the poor girl down the roadway in the direction of the gathering crowd.  “No” I insisted.  “She could be going into shock and she needs to sit down before she falls down again”. He looked at me and nodded and ran off to some unknown direction.  I sat the young lady down and asked her name.  “Me-Meaghan” she replied, still crying.  She had a pretty, oval shaped face with long blond hair.  She could not have weighed 98 pounds soaking wet.  I asked her if she was OK.  I gave a cursory glance for any wounds and checked for any obvious compound fractures.  Still crying, she managed to let me know that she didn't believe that she was seriously hurt.  “How old are you kiddo” I asked.  “18” she said and drew another breath to continue her fit of anxiety.  I assured her that things were going to be OK.  At this point I looked up to see an middle aged woman trotting in our direction with some purpose.  I could see that this girl would be in good hands if I needed to run off to fetch that blanket.  I told the woman the young lady's name and that she might be going into shock.  “I’m going to run back to my truck and see if I have a blanket”.  I said, and quickly trotted back in the direction of my vehicle. 

It was right here that my little world suddenly crashed in on me.  As I looked up at the crowd that I had first seen running to the scene, I noticed that almost all of them- some 30 or 40 people, were all standing around in an almost semi circle, cell phones in hand, taking pictures and video of the event.  I looked over at the minivan still laying on it’s side in the median.  There were two or three people aggressively trying to get the drivers side door open.  Immediately behind them, some 25 or so people, arms outstretched, crowding in while holding their little black devices and pointing them at the action.  At once, I felt my lunch try to take leave of my stomach.  I suppressed the notion and realized that in my haste, I had not even thought to grab my phone out of the truck.  Now completely sickened,  I started back up in the direction of my vehicle.  Panic almost struck me as I started to wonder if any of these people had actually bothered to use those phones to call for help. 

I picked up the pace and ran past the first truck driver who now had his safety vest on and was directing traffic around the crowd.  Just as I reached my truck, I heard the sirens and breathed a heavy sigh of relief.  Someone had the sensibility to call after all.  As I climbed up, a police cruiser and two ambulances pulled up to the scene.  I watched two EMT workers head over in the direction where I had left the girl sitting on the side of the road.  Filled with confidence that she was now in better care than I could provide, I decided that myself and my truck were now more in the way of assistance than rendering it.   I sat down and started the truck and started to carefully ease it back into traffic. 

As I passed the scene, I noticed that the crowd of novice film producers were still aggressively working to hone their craft.  The sight once again sent tremors through my stomach and I was eager to depart the scene as quickly as I could.  As I drove away, I could not help but contemplate the absurdity of the things I had just witnessed.  Then the reality of it hit me full force: “They learned it from you” the voice in my head whispered. As I thought back over all the accident scenes I had photographed and documented in my 20 year career as a journalist, it sank in.  We taught these people this.  We showed them that there is some artificial value in documenting human misery and putting it on display for the our own sick satisfaction.   A new feeling washed over me: shame.  I was ashamed of what “media” had become.  The mad rush to get the next “thing” on your Twitbook page first so you can get some fake internet karma.  

I drove off wondering if what we have created may be our undoing.  If our instant information society may be more harmful in some ways than helpful.  I started to understand where the feelings of disgust and aggravation must come from that first responders exhibit toward this new breed of instant journalists.  I was reassured by the knowledge however, that there are still some people who can assess the situation and figure out what needs to be done: The people who worked to extract the driver from the minivan, the other truck driver, the young man who can run faster than this old man, and of course the first responders who arrived way faster than I thought possible.  I drove away knowing full well that I will probably never see that young lady again. I know that I left her in good hands and not much else about her.  But I do know this: Her name was Meaghan.  Which is a lot more that the people gawking at her picture on Facebook today will ever know about her.