Wednesday, May 19, 2021

OUR POLICE

                                                          

My family has been involved in public safety for over fifty years. Myself, 30 years in the fire service and my son twenty years in the police service. During that time, I have known many good Police Officers and Firefighters. Were there any bad ones? Absolutely, but as my son used to say. “No one hates a bad cop more than a good cop.” I am sure that rings true for the fire service and for just about any line of work you can bring to mind. Bad behavior is a reflection on all of the members.

 

I read with dismay the attempts of people in Minneapolis and other cities to get rid of their Police Departments and the Police aren’t even part of the discussion because the city officials don’t want to even hear what they have to say. This motley group of elected officials who have little idea what Police Officers go through, have it all figured out without police participation.  It’s a shame because most of the good Police Officers will be leaving. It’s hard to get new officers to fill positions in towns where they are wanted right now. Why would they subject themselves to work for people like this? My heart goes out to every police officer who served his/ or her city for years. Working night and day through natural disasters and bloody car wrecks. Been cursed and spit on and chastised for doing their job. Who worked through Christmas Eves, their kids’ birthdays and almost every kind of macabre incident and then had to hide their natural emotions and then go home and be a dad or a mom or a husband or wife? I ask you, if a teacher messes up in a school, do they fire all of the teachers? If your paster misbehaves, do you close up the church? If a Nurse messes up do you close the hospital? You can see where I am going with this and the answer is always no. An emphatic no.

 

A public body hired to keep law and order in our communities is, and always has been, necessary. It’s written right in most of the charters. Human beings, being what they are, will always need supervision and outside guidance when it comes to the laws we live under. The only ones who don’t want the Police, are those who choose to live outside the laws and those who support the people who don’t want to live within the laws. Recent incidents have been used to inflame the public. The media does play a big part in this as do certain legislators. There will always be tragic mistakes in law enforcement and every effort must be made to correct that, Police need to be held accountable when they cause harm to those they are paid to protect. It seems to me that is what’s happening,and what is being proposed, will only exasperate a growing crime problem in Minneapolis. The tax payers will just have another multi-million-dollar feel good program that will be with them forever and solve nothing. 

 

All right I will get off my soap box. Policing is not the same in this small town as it is in Minneapolis. There are not a lot of shootings up here, not at people anyway. There were 11 people shot in Minneapolis yesterday and 2 killed. Do you think compassionate care will fix that? Police do not want to deal with mentally ill people and having the appropriate people do that is a right move. Is race a factor? Yes absolutely. But you can’t legislate the healing that needs to take place for that to end. It needs to come from the hearts and minds of all of us and it’s been going on forever. Anyone who has the answer--- for God’s sake tell us.

 

Saturday, May 15, 2021

A GOOD EXAMPLE

                                                             A GOOD EXAMPLE

 

I went down to the river the other day just to sit and think. The river is only about a mile from my house and it’s always so peaceful there this time of the year. The place where I like to sit is in a bend on the river on a slight bluff and there are some small rapids right above there. So upstream the water is somewhat turbulent but then as it goes around the bend and flattens out flowing peacefully on its way again. To a mind that thinks like mine thinks, it reminds me so much of the days of our lives. We all have those turbulent times come at us too, just like the river does but then we get through them and then they are over and life carries on. Like the water flowing down the river and around the bend, our yesterdays and todays seem to disappear around the corner somewhere out of sight, never to be lived again. Gone but not forgotten.

 

A man I admired so much passed away last week. He was a fixture in this town having lived a good share of his life here. He was a humble man but yet he was a mentor to many of us and a former business man. His life was rooted in his church and his family. His spouse and him were a loving couple for almost a third of a century. You rarely saw them apart.  He was a walking encyclopedia of Crosslake and his memory was a cornucopia of days gone by. The good old days so many of us old people identify with. His health wasn’t good the last few years and he had a lot of trials and suffering. But every time I saw him, he had a smile for me and he never dwelled on the bad things. Yes Leo, yours was a life well lived. May you rest in peace.

 

It has been a privilege for me to be able to write about people who lived storied lives while they were here on this earth. People tend to acquaint greatness with public figures and wealthy people. But to me greatness was never about that. Greatness to me is about people who made this world a better place to live in, by their good example. I once had such a man in my life. A grandfather who believed in me and told me that greatness was rooted in humbleness and honesty. Because if you had that, you had credibility and respect and if you were someday buried in a gold-plated casket and laid to rest under a monument that dwarfed all of the others in the graveyard, -- but didn’t have credibility and respect-- you had nothing.

 

There has been a steady erosion of the ideals that made this country great lately. I think its because you can’t get there anymore with honesty and humbleness. Instead, people are rewarded with leadership positions by lying and false bravado. How can you trust anyone who resorts to this kind of behavior, to farther their cause? Maybe it’s expecting too much in today’s world to be rewarded for good behavior. Maybe the new norm is whatever it takes to get there. If that’s true then I for one am glad I lived on this earth for the greatest part of my life, when it wasn’t true. The sadness in this is the world must go on, and go on it will, but gone will be the building blocks that once defined this country. I can only look at the children who inherit it from us and say I’m sorry for all of the problems. Show us the right way.    

 

It is my wish that someday when my time comes people will say his was a life well lived. That he too was a good example, just like my grandfather and Leo were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

WAS IT A BAD IDEA?

 WAS IT A BAD IDEA?

 

250 years or so, when this country was founded the intent was to form a democracy where all people would have a shot at making a living and live peacefully with their neighbors. Our country was a melting pot of people from many different parts of the earth. Our founding fathers didn’t feel this was an impediment and that we would bridge the gaps between faiths languages and ethnicity’s and everybody would be treated equal. They even wrote it in the constitution that all men were created equal. Equal yes, but yet at the same time they knew different and that some would always do better than others. Just so it wasn’t at the expense of others that was okay,

 

At least for a while this worked but some of the things that made it work such as common decency, unselfishness and morality may have just as well been written in the sand on a beach somewhere because like the incoming waves washing over those sands, the ideals that had brought us this far, slowly eroded away. The gaps between the haves and the have nots grew wider. Human greed and selfishness raised its ugly head and as time passed it became less and less an undesirable trait and more like the status quo. In many cases the human conscience just gave up and quit working.

 

Those on the bottom gave up on the “Pulling themselves up by their boot straps scenario” and resorted to a form of Robinhood politics of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Their votes counted as much as the rich’s votes at election time so politicians resorted to making all kinds of happy promises to them. One only needs to reread these last two paragraphs to see where the problem lies and where it is headed.

 

Until it’s recognized that we aren’t all created equal in every sense and those at the top start to share their time, money and talents with others, instead of having it wrested from them, then we will continue down this path to ruin and doom. The others at the bottom need to do their part to earn their keep. Work needs to be more than a four-letter word. The world does not owe you a living. The others at the top need to recognize that at some point unless things are more equitable there will be a rebellion and then we all suffer. The politicians need to stop aiding and abetting both groups and pay more attention to the middle class which suffers the most. One needs to understand the liberals desire to make things more equitable but not at the expense of taking away any incentive to become your own person. “Give a man a fish etc.” You know the saying. At the same time, one needs to recognize the fact that the less government we have controlling our lives, the better off we will be until you forget how to behave in a free society. 

 

We need to care about our country and each other more. Otherwise, there will be no country 

or each other. It’s that simple. There are powerful adversary’s right now watching and waiting

to see, if and when we destroy ourselves and save them the trouble of doing it to us-- or will

they see a united country that they will continue to fear. Time will tell.