I’m mad as hell and I have been for a while. In order for you to understand why, I need to take you back to 2010.
That year, a bill called the James Zadroga 9-11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 was introduced to the Senate. It called for health benefits to be extended to 9-11 first responders who had developed terminal illnesses or debilitating ailments directly due to toxic exposure during their rescue efforts on September 11, 2001. When the Zadroga bill was introduced, the GOP filibustered for as long as they could, and when the bill finally came to a vote, 41 of 42 Republican senators voted against it. Sam Brownback of Kentucky abstained. Others who blocked this bill included John Boehner and Eric Cantor. Ron Paul and Paul Ryan both voted no. In fact, Ryan voted twice against the bill before going on vacation, but then, on September 11, 2012, his way of showing his support for 9-11 first responders was by having a nice lunch with a group of firefighters. I certainly hope it was his treat, at least.
We should all be aware that, contrary to what the bill’s opposing senators believed, the first responders didn’t all have health care insurance that would have allowed them to have their illnesses treated free of charge. They didn’t all have disability packages that would allow them to retire and live well financially, as they battled cancers and more. No, it was their spouses and families who were left to pick up the slack when their paychecks stopped coming in. In fact, the bill was proposed because human beings who risked their own lives to save the lives of other human beings were finding themselves seriously ill, and as a result unemployed, without the money they needed to get medical attention for health problems they were suffering due to extended exposure to the toxins they’d braved at Ground Zero.
I bring this up because the GOP are some of the very same who are now, in 2016, chanting, “Blue Lives Matter!” No they don’t. Not to you. Well, okay, maybe they matter just a tiny bit more than Black lives matter. (Yeah, I know ─ you didn’t see that coming in this rant, did you?)
So that’s one thing I’m mad as hell about. Don’t scream out “Blue Lives Matter!” in my hearing when decent cops and firefighters needed your help, and you withheld it. Don’t tell me you honor our vets when you’ll spend piles of money on weaponry to fight your revolting wars, but when military personnel come home shell-shocked and horrifically wounded, they get pitifully little medical and psychiatric care because there isn’t any money for it. I don’t care what flag from which party you’re waving at the time, don’t tell me you’re looking out for “the people” and “the country” when you are in actuality looking to keep your job, but not do it.
Which brings me to the second thing I’m mad as hell about: those who want to keep their jobs, and get paid for their jobs, without doing those jobs. You know the kind of sleazeball I mean. If we haven’t come across one personally, we’ve heard of one. We’ve heard of the cop who called in sick while all his colleagues were down there pulling dead bodies out of rubble for months on end. We know of the congressman who’s owned by lobbyists and is legally on the take, so that if he’s told not to vote on a bill that will help first responders or veterans, he won’t. We know of the tenured teacher who cannot be fired by law, even if he or she is not only incompetent, but say, shows up to school drunk.
Oh, yeah. I’m a former teacher, and I came across a teacher like that when I was teaching. In fact, I came across more than one “teacher” like that. Those who had infiltrated the system, kept their heads down and their noses reasonably clean until they were permanently appointed to a school and then you were stuck with them. They affected the entire system like a bad computer virus. If you were a decent, caring teacher, if you respected yourself and your pupils, if you believed in the job you went to school for and were hired to do, you had to find a way to work around those viruses, because they were permanent. They made your job all the harder, because while you were sincerely trying to impart wisdom and life skills to the young people in your charge, you had to compensate for the damage that was being done to them daily by those colleagues who simply did not care if they taught their pupils anything or not. And if you yourself were not tenured, (in other words, like a rookie cop) and you wanted to keep your job, because you truly thought you could make a difference, you had to avoid confrontations with those colleagues. You couldn’t report them for incompetence, because it was your word against theirs, and they were there longer. So you had two choices: quit, or keep your mouth shut and do your best to teach. But the whole time you were there, you were aware of that colleague who was happy to crap all over your belief that you were there to do some good.
And for those who are wondering, I do not exaggerate this one iota. Good teachers not only deal with their pupils and their administration, they deal with colleagues who are not only incompetent and sometimes drunk, they also deal with the real shitheads who hurt their pupils, whether psychologically, physically, or sexually. And they also have to deal with the colleagues who, while maybe not incompetent or uncaring or harmful themselves, feel compelled to defend those who are, compelled to offer excuses, explanations and qualifications. And that’s because those teachers are afraid that if they became a part of a movement for change within the system, if they stand up and stand out and defend those pupils who are being harmed, who cannot defend themselves, if they point a finger at a shithead who’s pretending to be a teacher, then what will happen? Would tenure change? Would there be some modification to the skewered system that might make things even slightly uncomfortable for them personally? Yeah. Change might. So instead of just keeping quiet and going about their business, they had to really make you sick to your stomach by making excuses for things that were simply wrong.
I dealt with them too. Teachers like me dealt with all that because if we didn’t, if we left, we knew we were leaving the pupils we genuinely cared about to deal with all that on their own.
So, now tell me ─ don’t you think it’s that way for the people in blue, too? Don’t you think that right now, there are those within the police force who not only have to deal with incompetent, harmful colleagues ─ you know ─ the ones we’ve been seeing on the news a hell of a lot lately ─ but also have to deal with those who blatantly ignore or even defend them? What’s it like for those cops, I wonder, whose job is certainly much more challenging and dangerous than teaching is, at least when I was doing it? The cops who, not only go out on the streets, doing their best to keep themselves safe while dealing with all sorts of horrific things: murders, domestic violence, drunk drivers, abused children, drug overdoses, babies left in dumpsters, and on and on, and then have to go back to their precinct to deal with the shithead who defends or covers up for the other shithead who beat up a homeless man, killed an innocent Black kid, let someone die in a prison cell, and every other savagery we’ve been seeing and hearing about for decades now since YouTube came into existence and those savageries can no longer be unseen?
What’s it like for that cop? Have you ever thought about it? For a truly hardworking, caring, concerned cop, someone who believes in himself and his chosen field, who really means to “protect and serve,” what’s it like for him to live with those pieces of skank every day? Do any of us care about that cop? Or do we care more about preserving our idea of what it is to be a cop?
Well, I care about that cop, just like I cared about the good, devoted colleagues I had when I was teaching, and the pupils I taught. I care about the cops like my cousin, who was twenty-six when 9-11 happened and she was only out of the academy for four months. She worked a 36-hour shift at Ground Zero, starting one hour after the planes hit, before she could go back to her precinct and regroup. She had to take that all in, four months out of training. After that, she worked twelve hour shifts from September through January down there, and then eight hour shifts through March. She was new, and that was her assignment, and she did it, no questions asked. That’s the kind of cop I’m defending. I’m standing up for that cop, just like I’m standing up for every innocent life taken or destroyed by a shithead cop. Why does that cop get the same respect she does? Why does he get to keep his job, when he does nothing but make the world miserable, while he hides in his blue uniform behind the backs of his colleagues who stand up tall? Why do we defend him? Why do we allow him to slither around among those good officers, who have honor and morality, just like I had honor and morality when I was teaching, just like my cousin the cop and I have taught our children to have honor and morality? Why do we qualify, ignore, defend and excuse wrong? Why do we do that?
So, when I say, “Black Lives Matter,” because they do matter, and they should matter to everyone, no matter what color your skin is, and some asshat on Facebook or Twitter retorts with “All lives matter,” or actually, horrifically accuses me of being “glad that the cops in Baton Rouge were killed,” here’s what I have to say to those people: Integrity matters.
If you are in any way defending corruption and depravity with a slogan, if you’re hiding your head in the sand, or if you’re feeling “hurt” because you’ve personalized the criticism of the evil that is being perpetuated and exposed, and see that criticism as an attack on your little clique of friends or your favorite group, you make the problem that much worse. You are harming good officers like my cousin. And if good officers decide to quit their jobs because it’s just not worth it anymore, then you know what? You get the police force you deserve.
(As an aside, I have been told by my publicist not to publish this essay until after my latest book comes out, and I confess, I thought about it. It’s hard to write a book and get it published, and I don’t want to let down the people who have helped me achieve that. So, I even went off social media for a while to think about that.
But guess what? My pesky sense of right and wrong kicked in again. This had to be said, for every life that’s been taken that should not have been taken, whether it was a cop’s life or the life of a innocent citizen who was marginalized, demoralized or brutalized because of his race, his creed, or his circumstances. If you want to stop following me on social media, or you want to stop reading my work, because this essay, my TRUTH, has offended you, you should go right ahead. I will buy my books myself and give them away for free rather than stand down on this.)
#BlackLivesMatter
#OnlyGoodCopsMatter
#IntegrityMatters
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