What Are Your Prime Directives?

My dad's a cop. My father in law is a cop. My best friend from elementary school through 9th grade became a cop. I've got family that are cops, family that married cops, divorced cops, and stole cops from their previous spouses. In short. I know cops as people. And as people some of them are great and some of them are jerks. All of them have their personal struggles and some of them have struggles exacerbated by being a cop. Divorce rates- higher among cops. Suicides- higher, domestic violence rates- higher, depression, heart attacks, hypertension, alcoholism, all higher among cops. This doesn't "mean" anything. It might suggest that if it's part of your job that you see the worst of humanity all the time you could possibly go nuts and die young. Cops aren't simply exposed to horrible things; generally they have to see the world as horrible.

I got pulled over the other day for avoiding an accident. There is a section of road south of our house that is notoriously dangerous. There are pretty bad accidents at least twice a month on this 1/4 mile stretch of highway- commuters enter and exit freeways here, competing with local big box shopping traffic for too few lanes, avoiding SUV driving/call making do-it-your-selfers and my-truck's-a-piece-anyway-so-who-cares-if-you-hit-me contractors, merging with local traffic that has no other north-south route to use to get to North Glendora, all driving on a road with poorly engineered traffic flow devices... Where was I? Oh- So I'm driving south bound when a white Ford mini-van coming from the west (so pointing east) makes a right turn in front of me. And rather than just slamming on the brakes and crashing into the van, I get off the gas and swerve to minimize the collision with the van and any car that might hit me from behind. (I really do think these things through. My dad didn't get too into passing good moral advice onto his kids but he really drilled active driving into my head. We would actually practice emergency driving drills in parking lots. I know exactly when to brake and turn to go from reverse, turn 180 degrees and accelerate forward, I know how to get a car out of a slide, spin, or fish tail- with that I also know how to put a car into a fish tail, spin, or power slide. That's weird... But also pretty great- Thanks, dad.) I accelerate straight for a bit then pull back into my lane. So anyway, I avoided an accident but looked a little crazy doing it.

So a cop saw all this- or at least part of this. He pulled me over. Being in Glendora, and me being in brown skin, half of Glendora PD also joined in the adventure (in the minute or so it took me to explain what happened, three other cops showed up). He asked me what was going on- I asked if he saw what happened. He hadn't seen the van, he said he only saw me driving crazy. I said it wasn't crazy to avoid an accident. He went back to the other cops then came back and asked for my driver's license, registration and insurance info. (It's interesting that it wasn't the first thing he asked for- maybe he was new). Then he went back for another discussion with his colleagues and to run my info. After the conference they decided I wasn't going to get a ticket. I didn't not get a ticket because he believed my explanation; I didn't get a ticket because my dad's a cop. I didn't tell him that, my driver's license did. If my driver's license had kept quiet, I probably would have gotten a ticket for an unsafe lane change that, in my estimation, wasn't unsafe. I would've been angry and taken it without dinner or a kiss. Oh well- everyone a cop pulls over has an excuse. Everyone is unbelievable. When it's your job to protect stupid people from stupider people you notice people being stupid and perhaps start to think people are only capable of being stupid. (One of my father in law's favorite expressions is, in fact, "stupid people"). Replace stupid with evil and that's a pretty miserable way to see the world.

So...

I know cops have dangerous jobs, but so do crab fishers. Cops face different dangers. The dangers they face don't only come from people shooting at you but from knowing that people want to shoot you, from having to see the stupid things people do, from seeing only the stupid things people do, from needing to see only that so you can do your job, from building calluses on your soul so you can get by. Similar things happen to people in the military and their families. Similar things happen to everybody. There are things we do that go against the grain of our being human...

Hmmm... I just lost interest in this. I was thinking of things that we do that go against that grain- well not what we do per se- but how we do them. I thought I wanted to write about what our "grain" is but now it's not that interesting to me. Or... I guess I'm interested but it seems like too much work.... Like I can't address it responsibly considering how lazy I feel right now. That's weird.

I'm gonna make a quesadilla.

All The Turkey's Gone
Better Git Hit in Your Soul- Charles Mingus
La La Love You- The Pixies
All Day and All of the Night- The Kinks
Army- Ben Folds Five
As Ugly As I Seem- The White Stripes
Sweet Talkin' Woman- ELO
Happy Jack- The Who
How I Could Just Kill A Man- Rage Against the Machine
Blue Orchid- The White Stripes
Run- Air
The National Anthem- Radiohead
My Love- Paul Mc Cartney
Murray- Pete Yorn
Raindrop- Tripping Daisy