Make My Day

There are times when my inner right-wing nutcase, the one I hate to admit is there, comes out. Last night, watching the destruction in Ferguson, MO, was one of them.

The authorities there had a long time to prepare for the release of the grand jury’s decision on whether to indict Ferguson cop Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown last summer. We heard all about their plans, including the activation of the National Guard, amid complaints about the militarization of American law enforcement. A lot of good that militarization did, as rioters burned police cars and buildings and looted stores -- and responding firefighters were shot at. This trained force couldn’t – or wouldn’t – stop them.

I’ve heard some of my friends say of last night’s destruction, “Well, it’s only property, it can be replaced.”  No, it’s more than that. In some cases, livelihoods were involved. It’s one thing to trash a chain auto parts store, perhaps, but it’s another to destroy a locally owned business. Both are wrong. Most of us can intuit the difference between real protesters and those who take advantage of situations. The cops should be able to do that as well.

We can certainly debate the wisdom of the decision to take this case to the grand jury in the first place. But the prosecutor was right when he said this group of people took their time and weighed their decision carefully. It could have taken hours. It took weeks. Maybe they came down the wrong way, but that’s part of the system we have agreed as a civilized society to go by.

If I were in charge, I might have waited until the next blizzard or other spate of bad weather enveloped the Midwest before releasing the decision, assuming that were legal. But where was law enforcement when it was needed? What kind of a message is sent when it seems to stand by and do nothing? And in many cases, get paid overtime for it?

Maybe the police train for the wrong things in these cases, dispersing huge crowds instead of dealing with a few crazies, I don’t know. But please forgive me if my right-wing demon wants to see something bad happen to those who take advantage of situations like this.  Just once.

Living in America

The immigration debate is a story about recognizing reality. Tonight in his television address, President Obama laid out his plan for dealing with it. The major effect of his executive order will be to allow some five million people now living in this country illegally (I’ve never understood this “undocumented” stuff – useless euphemism IMHO), to remain, without fear of being deported, and be able to get work permits.

That’s a lot of people. And the reality is, they’re HERE. Can you make them all disappear? Mr. Obama isn’t stupid. This order is also about keeping families together, and it’s being issued as we approach the biggest family time of the year.

The Congress can’t discuss this matter civilly and resolve it, and the President is trying to move things forward. When the quarterback can’t find anyone to pass to, sometimes he decides to run with ball himself. Usually he doesn’t get very far, but he tries anyway.

Look, here’s some more reality. This issue is complicated, but fixable, maybe only piece by piece. The immigration regulations we have now are tweaked all the time to fit our needs. Congress has done it before. There’s a program called EB-5, which gives foreign investors special immigration status here if they open a large business in this country that creates jobs. And if it were determined that the U.S. suddenly needed left-handed widget-twisters from Indonesia, the rules would be adjusted to let them in. All countries do things like this.

Certainly we have to secure the borders. But as porous as they may be in some places, they’re impregnable in others. How many horror stories have there been of Americans trying to return to this country after traveling to Canada and being detained on this side of the border for six hours or more for no stated reason? It happened to a friend of mine who is white, and whose name doesn’t sound remotely Hispanic – or Middle Eastern.

What would be the impact on our economy if the five million people in question were forced to leave? First of all, it would likely be a much more expensive prospect to make them disappear than to keep them. And what jobs wouldn’t be done, what consumer prices would skyrocket, if these folks weren’t among us?

Did the President exceed his authority? Did he sour relations with Congress (like they’re any good now)? Very likely, yes to both. Pity the poor immigrants in the middle, whose heads must be spinning, wondering where they stand. But instead of simply trying to knock down what the President has done and prolong the torture, can the current members of Congress actually take steps to deal with this issue, as their predecessors did? It doesn’t have to be perfect. But it does have to be realistic. Just pass a bill.

Following Through

This is one of those topics I don’t really have the standing to write about, because I’m not one: a veteran.

But here’s a story. Last week I had a temporary job observing a trial in federal court. I was not the only one. There was another fellow, who happened to be retired from the Air Force on disability. It wasn’t a typical combat injury. His job was to load those big military cargo planes – the ones so big that getting them off the ground seems to defy the laws of physics. Eventually, he threw his back out.

He loaded the planes both at domestic AFBs and in Iraq. At one point, I was moved to ask him if he ever had to load the planes with the caskets of those who died in combat, and if it bothered him. He said he got used to it. But the caskets had labels on them, and on more than one occasion, he found himself loading the remains of people he knew. He didn’t get used to that.

As for his injury, he said the VA was taking care of him, and so far at least, he was pretty happy with the medical attention he was getting. Of course, this isn’t true of many veterans suffering mental and emotional as well as physical wounds.

The original name of this holiday was Armistice Day, marking the official end of World War I on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month in 1918. So the day is about peace, not war. But the damage done in war remains, long after peace treaties are signed or troops are pulled out of a combat theater. General Colin Powell once said that our invasion of Iraq invoked the Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it. This applies not only to countries, but to the veterans who come home in less than one physical or mental piece. This is what “supporting the troops” really means, and it doesn’t matter whether the war was a “good one” or not.  Hopefully, the proposed reform of the VA will see us following through on our responsibility to care for them.

Not all veterans, of course, see combat. These days, it’s mostly a voluntary duty. But often, I wish we had more veterans to honor on this day. There is actually a very good argument for mandatory military service. If more people were subject to it, I think we’d do a lot better job of picking our battles: going where we need to go and ignoring the places we don’t, because more of us would be paying attention. But that’s another subject entirely.

Clocking In

I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m beginning to think our twice-a-year time shifting in and out of Daylight Saving Time is useless. This year, it fell on Halloween weekend, so I joked that vampires get an extra nighttime hour to suck blood, but in practice, they don’t: the number of hours of darkness and daylight before we set our clocks behind remains the same afterward. We “give up” an hour in the spring and we “get it back” in the fall, and when we “get it back,” it seems like a gift of some sort. Sorry, but this sounds an awful lot like taxes.

Animals, of course, do not recognize our artificial time shifts. Our pets tend to show up in the morning at their food dishes according to when daylight happens, expecting us to perform for them. It may be harder for human beings, as our fixed schedules don’t adjust for daylight: you either get up in darkness to go to work or drive home in darkness. Which is better? In the modern world, most people do both.

The winter months don’t help much with this process, simply because there are fewer hours of daylight on both ends. I have long loved DST because it says “spring,” and because those long summer evenings are delightful. But because there are so many hours of daylight in temperate latitudes, aren’t those summer evenings long anyway?

We can get into fistfights about how much energy DST actually saves, the necessity for children to wait for school buses in the dark, or the number of traffic accidents that occur because of the abrupt change in light conditions caused by the one-hour shift. But there are so many differences in workstyles and lifestyles that these time shifts will cause pain for some people and pleasure for others. So it all comes out in the wash, which is an argument for just leaving the clocks alone.

The other problem is, the whole DST thing is all subject to the whims of legislators. Arizona might secede from the Union if it were told it had to make the time shifts (and don’t ask, “Would we miss it?”). Plus, when Congress changed the dates of DST some years ago, many of my older electronic devices, which had DST built into them, didn’t get the memo, and choosing “automatic” for the time-set feature on these things is unreliable. So I have to reset them four times a year instead of twice.

We actually do have control over the amount of daylight we enjoy, but it’s expensive. We have to change latitudes. You can have the Endless Summer promised by the movie title just by having homes in two different hemispheres. Or, if you prefer, endless winter. Which means if you’re vampire, you’d better like it cold.

I’ll be back in about an hour, I have to run around the house and reset about 27 things. See ya.