What’s old is new again
Once again, Fred Reed is at his politically incorrect best. The target of his current column is community based policing. A few quotes:
An advantage, or disadvantage, of having been in the news racket too long is that you see the same nostrums proposed again and again.
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The police are terrible at hearts-and-minds just as soldiers are, and for the same reasons: They are incorrigibly authoritarian, clean-cut blue-collar believers in personal responsibility and self-discipline who find themselves shepherding anarchistic, often ethnically disparate people who donÃ’t care about anything the cops believe.
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A common phrase among the police is, “I’’m going home tonight.” They will humiliate a citizen before they will take a round in the head.
Fred’s thesis is that our police are seen, by certain segments of the population, as an occupying army. This is because these segments are so far removed from what we think of as “mainstream America” that they may as well be residing in some Third World Hell-Hole. And as is our experience when we send the military into TWHHs, the police are first welcomed, then feared, then resented, then attacked. (See, unfortunately, The Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Haiti, Lebanon and Iraq. Each exhibits some level of this phenomena.)
I’ve only been to one really large city, but I can see this same dynamic at work in the smaller cities and towns where I have visited and lived. It fits in nicely with the observations of many that the great American melting pot has disappeared and that our “multi-cultural society” is now breeding a nightmare scenario of takeover by disaffected minorities. We can see this well under way in France, Holland, Sweden and several other European nations today.
It also explains the continuing “police horror stories” such as the LA toddler shot in the head by a SWAT team, and this story about Indshopkeeperseprs in Georgia who have been charged with selling products to meth cookers (you’ll need BugMeNot). The first is “I’m going home tonight” writ large, the second is a failure of the melting pot to introduce these people to our American culture (although it also has overtones of anarcho-tyranny).
Additionally, the price of the failed policies of our homegrown wanna-be Socialists are starting to add up. Fred notes, “The baby carriages hold the fourth consecutive generation on welfare.” That fourth generation will grow up in those TWHHs that we’re allowing to grow right here in River City.
I suspect we’re seeing the beginning of a societal breakdown of epic proportions. If the situation doesn’t change, we will likely need all the beans and bullets we can stock up on.