Crushing A Fly With a Volkswagen - Preaching to the Choir Edition

Ned, the rock star ex-boyfriend who probably played on albums you possess, responds to this with a bit of the old white-hot vitriol:

Yes, there absolutely is more to this story! The "more" is two sets of parents that have long avoided kicking the asses of their charming little offspring that desperately need it in fear of being the "bad guy" and after all they just don't have time what with "the career" and the endless pursuit of big shiny expensive things that go "vroom vroom" and suck up more fossil fuel than Otis can guzzle in cheap moonshine on a Saturday night (insert a Harry Chapin tune here...covered by Cannibal Corpse!) The "more" is a judicial system that always seems to find time to twaddle around with bullshit like this while on the other side of town there's gang wars and people being raped and stray bullets striking innocent children and drug dealers and hookers and things being stolen on a minute to minute basis. Need I remind you of a young man in a New Brunswick emergency room dripping blood on the floor from a hole in his forehead while a "man in blue" asked him (and I quote) "Well, what the fuck do ya want ME to do about it?" The answer IS: sheer unadulterated LAZINESS! The cops in Fresno would have rather risked getting scratched on the arm by an 11-year-old girl than risk getting shot in the face doing what they're really supposed to be doing. Out in PA, there's a big ta-doo over hiring more police. WHAT THE FUCK FOR?! All they're gonna do is hang around the outskirts of town waiting for Joe Regularguy to forget to use his turn signal while chaos reigns supreme down in "the hood". As John Belushi once said "^%^&$%^%*^@!" Oh there's so much more to this story. Connect the dots between bullshit like this and things like "The Patriot Act" and (enter Robert Preston) "Wellllll, ya got trouble, my friends, right here in River City."

Dude! You're gonna pop a blood vessel!

A few years ago, Ned moonlighted as the doorman at a bar we all worked at, lived at and sometimes woke up in. One night, a local douchebag - as opposed to those elite-level douchebags we see on the news every night - didn't feel up to showing his ID and pitched Ned head-first down a long flight of concrete stairs. I happened to be in the bar that night with Paulie Gonzalez, and though this is a fishbowl so small you can't fit a fish in it, I didn't hear about this somehow until later.

Since everyone knew who committed the assault, you'd think that guy would be padding around a cell now in prison-striped pajamas, wouldn't you? Nope, the New Brunswick Police showed up. Did they arrest the alleged douchebag?

As for the short answer to the question on Loki, yes they HAD arrested him about THREE MONTHS after the incident, at which point they wanted to make me the fallguy for years of his bullying, while his "posse" circled around like knife-wielding vultures warning me of the consequences for my cooperating with the police. Subtle reminders like the business cards for Loki's tattoo shop being left on my windshield wiper. But to make a long painful story short, there was supposed to be a trial over all of this, and I grudgingly agreed to it. After I moved to PA I never heard another word about it, even after repeated calls to the DA & the police department to ask "What the fuck?" So you see my anger in that lies in the fact that they wouldn't deal with this as the criminal act that it was, they dealt with this as a "complaint". I.E.: the easy way out.

Well, next thing ya know ol' Ned's a millionaire...

Note: For once, I didn't change the guy's name because the name of the Norse God of mischief plainly isn't something Mom dreamed up, and everyone knew what happened, and the raw deal just never ended.

Ned is not, in fact, a millionaire, but he would have felt like a million if he could have accessorized with a little sympathetic handling by the cops. People who complain about the police are not always whiners and miscreants. Sometimes, they're people with legitimate problems who turn to the police for help and instead get the shaft.

I'm not saying everyone who complains about the police has a point but some do. We can't believe everything we hear, but we should give everyone a fair chance to speak. In Fresno, the police chief's mom should grab his earlobe, twist and send him to bed without supper. In Guantanamo Bay, people are being held without charges, access to lawyers or hope of due process. And if we listen closely, our administration is quietly telling us it is planning invasion of yet another sovereign nation without a declaration of war.

Hmm.

I looked this up. If you can stand it, our President reminds me of a character I vaguely remember from a Star Trek episode called "The Squire Of Gothos." Captain Kirk and his unnaturally attractive crew are confronted with a seemingly all-powerful being named Trelane who bats them around like cat toys. Just as Kirk's about to sacrifice himself to save his crew, two voices scold Trelane and tell him, essentially, you can't play with your things like that. Here's a synopsis. Please have a look. It's time for us to rein in our errant children and our errant President, and our errant police departments. We don't have to be angry about the whole thing, just firm and patient. The administration has had every opportunity to demonstrate it can guide the nation, with the nation's best interests at heart, and in a way that doesn't harm the planet or hurt other peoples. Our children need a spanking - not a beating, a spanking. And our police departments need a new idea of who's in charge, because we are, and locking up an 11-year-old for throwing a rock is childish and immature.

Patience. Firmness. Liberal use of the calmly spoken "No." Discipline is required, and we must make our intentions clear. No. No. No.