Some things never change

Hi all

Wrote this back around the last election.

I was riding shotgun in a Sheriff's Department patrol car, sometime after midnight on a weeknight, cruising the dark streets of an unincorporated area near here, and the dog was barking right next to my left ear. I cannot remember the dog's name, but it was twenty plus years ago, so I hope you can forgive me. This tour was called a ride along, and the cops will sometimes do this to give us naïve civilians a taste of what the dark of night feels like to them. The police dog was a patient of mine, a rather cranky fellow, and his bark was deafening. The officer had been a client for years and I think he enjoyed showing me around. I spent most of that night with the two of them, cruising streets I thought I knew, but feeling very different about them from that unique point of view.

The area we patrolled that night was not one of our finer neighborhoods. The locals used to claim that those two rundown bars on the main drag near the east end were so rough that if you showed up without a gun or knife, they would issue you one at the door. These same locals took a certain pride in the bad reputation the area had. It was a badge of honor they wore proudly. Most were decent enough folks who simply didn't worry much about the traditional ways of keeping up with the Jones's, but there was a significant criminal element there too, who made ya want to lock your doors when you drove through. At night the Sheriff's Dept stationed two cars out there, usually one at each end, and they stayed in touch constantly in case one or the other needed back up.

Most of the time each officer was alone, so if he had to deal with more than one of their customers at a time, it could get interesting. The dog evened things out considerably, but you couldn't bring him out of the car to munch on folks for the minor things, so that officer learned other tricks to control multiple troublemakers. He said that the pair of handcuffs he left dangling from the pushbar on the front of his patrol car was just the thing for when he had to restrain more than one person at a time, since he certainly couldn't park a perp in the backseat with that dog, tempting as that might be. He said he never did actually drive off with one of those troublemakers chained to the front of the car, but he did claim to have mentioned that temptation to some of the big mouthed ones, from time to time. It functioned as something of a deterrent.

Did I mention it was dark? Most of the streets had no streetlights, and it was as dark as Hillary Clinton's heart. I sat wedged in between a bank of radios, a laptop computer mounted to the officer's right, and a pump shotgun, with the wire screen between me and that perpetually angry German shepherd in the back. The bulletproof vest I wore was a smidge too small. The two-way radio competed with a scanner that helped the officer keep track of the highway patrol frequency, and other police and fire/emergency departments. Slowly, we motored through the streets, pretty much just watching and waiting for folks to make things go wrong in the world.

The narrow backstreet was lined with mature trees. There were no curbs or sidewalks. The homes were small and old, a few well cared for and the rest dilapidated and a bit ominous looking in the cone of light from our patrol car. About halfway down the block, a house on the left slowly came into view. Parked in front, across the street, and in the driveway and the middle of what once was a front yard, were half a dozen cars. People stood around in the dark at one AM like it was a yard sale on Saturday afternoon, and then scattered like cockroaches when the light hit them. The dog was going nuts, barking and growling. My officer slowed as we passed, window open, dog barking, cockroaches distressed. He made no attempt to silence the dog as we passed.

We were just showing the flag. It was a drug house, and this was how you let them know that you know that what they were doing there was no big secret. Somebody else on some other night would raid the place, but for this night apparently our job was just to annoy them a bit. Someday they would all get chased down the street and arrested, and the dog would probably get to bite a few, which he really wanted to do, and then the dog would sniff out the drugs from their hiding places and somebody would go to prison for a while and the drug house would move to another dark street, and the game would start all over again.

I remember thinking that somebody in there was working hard enough, buying and selling drugs, and probably fighting for the turf and rights to sell there, and he was going to “work” all night every night, and he was probably working harder at this nonsense than if he just went out and got a job. And I wondered briefly, why would ya even bother?

I'm older and wiser now, and perhaps just a bit jaded. I don't ask that question as often these days. For one thing, in a perverse sense this guy was following the American Dream. He prospered from working with his own hands, being his own boss, sinking or swimming by virtue of his own initiative. He hoped to earn more working his own racket than he could make working for someone else. He was an entrepreneur.

And he probably would have been very annoyed if, instead of arresting him, the government came along and put him out of business by taxing him to death so it could use his money to set up its own program to pass out free recreational drugs to the needy. Then, if this guy thought about anything other than skin color, he would probably vote against Obama.

The politicians have us common people all stirred up these days, arguing over just how much we should ask not what our country can do for us; ask what we can do for our country. One bunch of politicians says they are going to limit the negative impact of government upon free folks, and the other would turn government loose to fix any and everything wrong in the world that impacts needy folks. Both are worthy goals I suppose, but they run at cross purposes. Hence, the need for these arguments.

I have long contended that the best of what comes from the human species results from the things we do as motivated individuals, and also what we do as a well-intentioned group, and the worst that comes from the human species is that which comes from the selfish individual or the misguided group. The history of our species, going back to that first monkey that stood on its hind legs to reach for a piece of fruit, or those first two in the garden of Eden who did the same, is nothing more than this.

The yammering of politicians would suggest that we can change this equation by simply putting one group of politicians out of work, and another in. For they would claim that it is the fault of that other group for whatever harm befalls us unfortunate citizens, when in simple truth, this is really the fault of our species’ reality.

Cleverly hidden in plain sight lies the truth. When one group of politicians says we should throw out the other set, what they really mean is we should instead substitute them for the other. Somebody talks us into putting them into power instead of the other, and they get what they want. Which is not solutions; it is Power.

What we get is more of the same. We get we the people, and the people never change.

But if you wonder why Obama, or whoever your favorite whipping boy might be, was running for re-election even before he was elected, just remember. This is never about fixing the mess. It is always about who’s in charge of the mess.