Facebook Drove Me Insane

Insane with a case of the dumbs.

What caused it for me?

Post after post, meme after meme, of how bloody wonderful the police are.

Gods that walk the earth they are!  Pleasant smelling too!

This got to the point that even a tangential mention of cops as something other than vile, disgusting, evil ogres sent me suborbital, trailing flecks of foam in my wake.

I made literally crazy replies to several.

A part of it stems from a general lack of positive exposure to cops.  Where my life and theirs have overlapped, cops are useless at best and needlessly intrusive at worst.  Nothing stolen from me has ever been returned, nobody who's materially harmed me has ever been arrested let alone charged or convicted.  Maybe you grew up in a better place than I did?

I don't attribute carte blanche good intentions to them because they are insuperably The Government, and I don't trust the government or its servants any more.

But it made me forget that cops are individuals too.  People.  People who are evil.  People who are good.  People who are neither (it's not binary).

Attributing evil to all cops is just like thinking all blacks are... pick something.

But attributing good to all cops is also incorrect.  While there may be heroic individuals in that uniform, the wearing of it does not make one a hero.  The same goes for a military uniform by the way.

In truth, 95% of my issues with cops has to do with the fucking morons who write the laws and regulations that the cops are then sent to enforce and/or define the means that they may pursue investigations.  Then I realize that those fucking morons were elected by us, the electorate who don't bother to learn a gorram thing about the candidates much past which (letter) follows their name.  The other 5% is a tendency for the job to attract exactly the same sort of person who bullied me for much of my primary school years.

Much of what was being posted on Facebook was mindless hero worship and mostly unearned by the "heroes" it was directed at.  This insane person concedes that in several (most?) instances that my response was inappropriate.  The thing that really lit the insanity fuse was the people who attributed the meme to a cop, or reposted it from a cop's page.  I like a bit of humility from public servants, and it's a raw spot to see the lack from police.  I am willing to bet that not a single cop wrote or reposted a single one.

Where's the "thank God for the solid waste disposal engineer" meme?  The people running the water treatment plant save more lives everyday than the police department will all decade.