Three cops shot in two days
Within the span of two days, three cops were shot and killed. Two in New York City, one in Tarpon Springs Florida. The two in New York received national headlines, while the one in Tarpon Springs Florida did not. The three officers killed were officer Rafael Ramos , and partner, Officer Wenjian Li of the NYC police department, both killed execution style, and Officer Charlie Kondek of Tarpon Springs, Florida who was killed during a routine noise complaint call. All had family.
In the past year some sixty police officers were killed by either gun fire or assault in the line of duty. There do not seem to be any mass rallies for these people.
The truth is that the police do the worst of jobs. They are charged with being our “keepers” even when we have lost control of our civility, or sanity. They are never liked by those
they must “keep” at the time. Yet it is a fact, that we are all in some way prone to “aberrant” behaviors from time to time. To say this is not so, would be to lie.
The jobs that police do are not pretty. They are harsh, and the men and women who do these jobs must come to grips with the difficulties involved in being our “keepers” when
less than constructive behavior overwhelms us. And it does, and it happens often, though not always to the extent that we might need the police to bring us back to our
more “civilized” selves. They must deal people while they are afflicted with the very worst of human psychological states, and almost always must deal with the threat of instant violence and death. This reality cannot be overemphasized.
But what is the real problem?
As sad as it is, and as painful as these murders are, they are not the fundamental cause of our problem. They are only one effect at the end of a very long line of causes. Society’s problem is not that a particularly disturbed individual shot and killed two cops-there are many disturbed individuals, and many are violent. Nor indeed that that young lives were lost in Ferguson, or Brooklyn. During police operations, like surgical operations in a hospital, sometimes things can go wrong. No these are only the effects, not the causes. The real problem is civility. The real problem is civilization.
We can point to this, or that particular instance, and say this is tragic-and it most certainly is! And those people who lost loved ones know this better than anyone. But in the most supreme truth those people lost are only the sacrificial lambs that our civilization must have to grow beyond its present state. As sad as this is, it’s the ultimate truth, and most of the time the truth is just not very pretty. Those deaths are the mistakes we make as a civilization and as a people. And they do come back to hurt us, as individuals. Even as honest individuals just doing our job and nothing more as was the case with the three cops shot while doing only their jobs.
In the long run, the real problem is not in the particular tragedies-sad as they are, but in our civilization. It’s in our ideas. It’s what’s in our “heads” that is the ultimate problem.
There was once a song, I cannot remember the singer, it was a Jamaican rap song back in the nineties and a line in it went something like this ” everybody in the city have idea have a gun, everybody in the city no idea have a gun”. When bad ideas meet guns, or knives, or cars, or bats, or bottles bad things happen quite often. It’s not so much the cars, the bats the knives, or the guns, it’s the ideas.
The one thing that would really help all sides, both the cops who must keep us during our more difficult times, and those others who are suffering under difficult social circumstances would be the presence of better ideas. Ideas more conducive to being civilized, and living an orderly , mutually constructive, just , lawful life as much as possible is the real key and solution to these problems. The key is indeed in the laws and how they are conceived, how they are written, and how they are to be executed. This is the key.
The various Media too play a gigantic role in how our laws are conceived, and if they are written, how they are written and how they are executed. Good ideas will stop much of this friction. Bad ideas will only make things ever worse.
Though all this may sound vague to some, in reality it’s the heart of the issue. And frankly the real issue is in the heart no matter how we may come to rationalize the truth.
If there is a good will towards the nation and its people, many good honest ideas can be dispersed among its people. If there is malice and corruption, and intellectual contortion, if it me versus him, no matter the circumstance, bad ideas will continue to foment, and violence will only escalate. It’s as simple as that, and in reality every human being in the nation knows the difference between bad ideas, and good ones. It is this knowledge that will ultimately keep us safe, and keep us free without needing a “gatekeeper” every full moon. Only this can help to improve things. Only this knowledge can keep these tragedies from continuing to destabilize the nation.
Each and every one of us knows the difference between a quite possibly good idea, and a very probably bad one. Deep down inside we all know.
The police only do the job they are commanded to do, and most of the time they do it right. Sometimes things go bad, as they do with any other complex profession. They are confronted daily with the worst of situations. They are in some neighborhoods confronted with decades if not centuries of injustice and neglect and they have to deal daily with the broken pieces, or in other places with those pieces that get broken during the course of everyday life. Their job is horrific, and they pay a terrible price sometimes. Yet what they do is invaluable, and this should never be forgotten by anyone. If there is indeed a problem, it’s in the laws and those writing the laws, and not with the gatekeepers.
Those three cops that lost their lives were innocent too like the 58 others who preceded , and the one that followed them, in sacrifice.