The Cops Don't Matter

... all that much.

I'm almost at the end of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, his autobiographical recollections of growing up in a hillbilly family in Kentucky and Ohio. All of the modern, secularist pathologies are there - illegitimacy, drug use, shacking up, poor school performance, violence and on and on and on.

As he closes the story, he talks about what made the biggest difference in his life, what made him turn from failure to success. A stint in the Marine Corps taught him that his decisions matter, that he's not some helpless cork bobbing about in a sea of forces that dominate his life. It's that feeling that you lack agency which holds you down, not some mysterious, malignant "them."

To the title of this post, we spend a lot of time talking about police behavior, probably 100 times more than we should when you consider their importance in anyone's life. How often does someone in the underclass actually interact with the police? How often do they interact with their parents and their peers? If you're a kid and you go home to mom and her 4th live-in boyfriend in 2 years, what had the biggest impact on your life, that time a few months ago when a cop got rough with you or the chaos and conflict at home every day and every night?

Black Lives Matter is more than just a modern version of the KKK. It's a complete distraction and a waste of time.

Dig this.

For sexual abuse the rates are even higher. Compared to the always intact married family:

• The rate of sexual abuse is 5 times higher in the single parent family and when both biological parents are cohabiting (i.e. unmarried).
• The rate of sexual abuse is 8.6 times higher if the child is living in a married step family.
• The rate of sexual abuse is 20 times higher if the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

If we acknowledged these facts, we'd have to re-examine our take on subjective morality and all-families-are-equal. We're not yet prepared to do that. Reality is a funny thing, though. You can only ignore it for so long.