Seattle Police Union President to Cops: Get With the Times or Get Out of This City

[slumcamper]

10. Not prone to cursing much (leave that to Rude, the master), but---

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck YEAH. Somebody with a goddamned brain and a keen sense of the contextual dimension of institutional adaptation to the course of social history--admittedly geographically contoured--speaks out. This is one of the most profound "lines in the sand" that has been drawn on the matter of police/public interface.

At the risk of goring a sacred ox, Obama was wrong. In fact, there ARE two "Americas." I realize that he was speaking from a 2004 vantage of "HOPE" (I still have the barn sign "HOPE" that was prominent in my yard months prior to the 2008 Iowa caucus). But any semblance of hope for one America has long since passed. The GOP politics of resistance, defiance and confrontation have negated that hope (for the moment); I'll concede that. The coiled serpent that adorns the Gadsden flag is a fitting symbol for this "other" America which refuses to tolerate anything other that its white, evangelical, conservative conception of what this nation should be (you know---the "I want my country back" types).

The Gestapo police mentality and frankly racist antics that social media has exposed in its ugliest forms is not "one America." It is an other America. It is a fearful, cruel, and intolerant America. And as Ron Smith rightly acknowledges, it isn't wanted in the America that you and I strive to build.

The work goes on. Obama was right on this count...change occurs brick by brick, block by block, town by town... It's incremental. How we bridge the current divide is an intriguing question. Keep fighting my friends...the long arc of history bends inexorably to the side of justice.