Happy Birthday

I am fairly certain that I spent some portion of last night with a lampshade on my head.  I honestly don’t remember.  The house is a mess, I have a four wheeler that needs some fixin, there is too much food and too many empty beer cans laying about and my boots are full of mud-on the inside. BUT DAMN IT WAS AWESOME!  I was blessed this 4^th of July to get to spend some time with my family at my home in South Florida.  There was too much food, there always is.  We grilled brats from Carroll’s Sausages in Georgia and they were fantastic.  Pasta salad that Melissa made with home made duck egg mayonnaise was out of this world.  We bought corn on the cob, but we forgot to cook it.  That’s OK though because the horses love corn on the cob-more for them I guess.    There was the screaming of small children in the house and it was music to my ears. 

We started the day at Peace River Seafood right down the road.  I want to say a special thanks to all the folks who worked on the holiday so that others such as ourselves may celebrate it.  The seafood festival that followed was no less than spectacular.  Oysters, clams, shrimp and crabs were sampled by all.   Peace River is the kind of place where when you order blue crab, its still alive and waiting on the back steps when you place the order.  I have not found a place that serves fresher, or better seafood. 

We followed this up with the age old American tradition of mixing alcohol with explosives. We broke out the firearms and headed down to the range.  I honestly can’t think of anything more American to do on America’s birthday than spending an afternoon with my nephews and cousins disposing of old communist ammunition-one bullet at a time. My nephew Blaze got to shoot a .380.  The smile on his face and the approval of the range master at our absolute application of firearm safety were awesome rewards for this venture.  (And for the record, the alcohol only came out AFTER the firearms were put back away.)

Then it was off to the mechanical horses.  We own two four wheelers and it didn't take long before people started to notice that it’s the rainy season in Florida-so there is PLENTY of mud on the ground. The younger kids squeals of delight while being toted around on the four wheelers through the pasture was food for the soul.  You cant help but enjoy the smile on the face of a child that goes from ear to ear when the get off such a fun little machine. 

  That was of course followed by my two nieces who INSISTED that they were going mudding with Uncle Boo Boo.  They paid for it…they had to ride behind me.  

Of course, my boots are still soaked through and I am not sure what I will be wearing on my feet today.  I know better than to wear my good boots on the trails, but by this point in the evening, the Allegany Mountain 140 proof moonshine liquor might have been making a few decisions for me.

I have a brother in law who is pretty sick and may not be long for this earth,

   I very much wanted to spend some time with him and I am glad I got to do it.  My only sadness comes from the fact that my children: Alex, Nicole and Steven are all off living their own lives and could not be home for this holiday.  By the way- HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICOLE!  I am sure you thought I forgot.

Too many holidays I have wasted not caring too much about celebrating them.  This year, with everything that has been happening in society around us, I kinda felt it important to celebrate everything that makes America the best place in the world to live.  A day where we can put our petty political differences aside for a few hours and just reflect and celebrate all the things that our founding fathers did to insure that we would have this opportunity.  I am not sure they intended for me to do it with a lampshade on my head, but at least I am free to do it.

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.