Saturday, November 29, 2014

Thought Piece

A year or so ago, I reconnected on Facebook with an old high school classmate that I hadn’t heard from since the early ‘60s.  After high school, he went to college, and joined the Air Force as a fighter pilot.  He retired from the Air Force and stayed in the Pacific Northwest where he is a regular contributor to his home town paper, providing opinion pieces that are well thought out and exceptionally articulate.  Typically, his views are conservative,  somewhere to the right of my own.

That is why I was amazed when he recently wrote that, in view of the incident(s) in Ferguson, Missouri, it was time to think about disarming police on street patrol.

I laughed when I first read that, thinking it was a joke,  Later, as he continued to defend the position, I thought he was just playing Devil’s advocate.  Now I’m wondering if he is suffering from dementia.

He points out that if Officer Wilson had been unarmed, the worst that could have happened in Ferguson was one dead cop and a miscreant on the loose – something that probably wouldn’t have made the news outside of the greater St Louis area.  There would have been none of the looting, vandalism, etc. that has wracked the country.  Nobody would have shut down malls on the biggest shopping day of the year.

All of that is probably true, and it is a seductive argument – as seductive as the song of those Aegean Sirens that led sailors to their death on the rocks. 

Nobody would have been forced to reexamine their views on prejudice or race relations or the viability of the American justice system.  But no good would have come from it, either.

Personal trainers are fond of saying “No pain, no gain” and I think that is just as true for civilizations as for individuals.

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