Up until high school I was a pretty straight forward young lad. I trusted (more or less) in authority and thought that the police had our best interests at heart even though I'd already had a pretty rough run in with them in junior high. And then I took Mr. Torney's social studies class in high school.
Mr. Torney had a bad rap around the school because if you fell asleep in his class he would shoot you with a Super Soaker. I never fell asleep in any class, so that was never an issue for me. I wound up in his classroom for the first time and saw that he was probably insane due to the decor. Most teachers went to various other classrooms to teach, but his classroom was clearly HIS. Hanging above his desk was a mannequin head wearing a Nixon mask with a bird perched on its forehead. And that was just the beginning. He had a lot of crazy stuff on the walls, but the one that drew my attention was a poster of an authority figure that said BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING.
I soon learned that this was a reference to 1984 by George Orwell, which I read for his class as well as Animal Farm. The more I learned in his class, the more I realized that authority figures might not be authority figures. The older I get? The more I am certain that they're no real authority.
I learned not to trust politicians from Mr. Torney. I learned not to trust the government from him. And I learned not to trust the police from him.
It was an eye-opening experience, taking that class. It taught me that not everything is what it seems, and if you dig deep enough you'll find people's true motives. Sometimes the government is right. A lot of times they're not. It's on a case by case basis, really.
But I think about the police mostly. For a while I even believed that bad apples theory, that when you hear about a cop stepping out of his (almost always his) lane, he's an exception, not the rule. But nope, when you realize that they're all of a brotherhood, that they watch each others backs, that even the so-called good apples will keep their mouths shut to protect the bad apples, you realize that they're all corrupt. And when Uvalde happened, I discovered that they're all cowards, too. Not a single one of them has any kind of courage. Their loyalty belongs only to themselves. No exceptions.
So yeah. I'm all in favor of disbanding the motherfuckers. Replace them with people who are courageous. Who have a loyalty to preserving the peace instead of to themselves. Who don't panic when confronted with a difficult situation. Who, instead of callously murdering people, they try to find peaceful solutions when possible. I get it if a guy is waving a machine gun that he's not supposed to have at the cops. They can shoot that guy. But a bunch of cops piling up on one person who isn't even armed? To the point where they actually KILL that person? I don't care if they thought that person was Satan himself, they don't get to kill unarmed people, no matter how much it will get their dicks hard. And killing people gets a lot of cops' dicks hard.
Wow. That got a little out of hand. I just wanted to talk about learning to distrust authority. But I stand by everything I said here.
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