Then I started thinking about what it really meant to arm cops with assault rifles. You see, I truly believe in John Edwards' concept of two Americas, just not the causes he describes. There's one with the money and the morality and the social cohesion and one without. The difference is the presence of dedicated fathers in the lives of their children. The portion of America without such fathers has devolved into such chaos and self destruction that the other portion of America is having to turn their police force into the US Marines in order to control the situation.
In that moment, I stopped worrying about how my blog crusade for 1950s-era morality came across. We're considering giving cops assault rifles because the violence of fatherless America is getting out of control. It's not the violence of some temporary series of riots, it's an everyday, ordinary, ambient, background level violence. We're not confronting the cause of the violence, we're just responding with greater firepower so we can win the confrontations. So long as the violence is contained within the neighborhoods where civilization has been wiped out and we can get to work or the mall or the kids' soccer game safely, we're fine with giving the cops armored personnel carriers if necessary.
So, yes, I'm sure I come across like some kind of spat-wearing, bow-tie clad, starched dork. I'll accept that consequence to my posts because, unfortunately, we're considering turning our police forces into this.
6 comments:
Yuo know it was always unnerving to see cops in Mexico toting machine guns as the patrolled the town square or the beach.
One does have to ask why can't the automatic weapons be restricted to the SWAT teams?
Your running theme reminds me of the inherent difficulty in one claiming to be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal as well.
...and perhaps the most indecipherable 'word verification' to date now awaits me.
Dean, I don't quite get what you said about being both a fiscal conservative and social liberal.
I like the series.
Maybe folks won't listen very well, but someone might, so it should be said.
Dean: type one letter and hit "publish" to get a new one. *grin*
KT: I understood him to mean that some social liberals are "so open minded their brains fall out," to borrow my dad's phrase.
Things like teen pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, drug use and other anti-social behavior that social liberals are more likely to turn a blind eye to or brush-off as "just life in the modern world" have real financial costs: day care centers at schools, more police on the street, more courts, more public defendants, more prisons and my fave... more of our tax dollars going to Planned Parenthood... more of all that to deal with the effects of the breakdown of the basic family unit that you are writing about.
Foxie, thanks. I'll give it a shot but its an easy one this time around. Don't want to press my luck.
Thanks for the response, Dean. I get it now.
I find that I'm less a fiscal conservative than I am a modified social liberal. That is, I want the results the social liberals want, it's just that their means have been proven to be failures. I want to see the little kids growing up in Oakland and elsewhere to have the chance to make something of themselves. I think the fiscal payoffs will come out of that.
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