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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
SalilM
Published Letters: 119 Editor's Choice: 6
Cary,
usually I agree with your musings a great deal. On this one, though, I'm going to have to chalk it up to your admitted inexperience with police and law enforcement. Because...well...no way.
First, I'm of the school that you can, in fact, change people sometimes, though it might be exhausting, and the outcome is never guaranteed, or even necessarily what you were originally hoping for. So you should not even attempt it unless you are absolutely sure that the person you are trying to change needs to change in the way that you want, and it is worth the effort, because the attempt can backfire, create resentment, and cause an already strained situation to slip beyond repair.
But the more important thing in all this is that from what the brother has indicated, the sister is not behaving properly. That is, he describes her as "a monster." Not as a strict law enforcement officer, not as someone who upholds the law, but as a person who scares him now.
I should mention that a great many cops, FBI agents, and the like are perfectly respectable people, capable of hanging up their badge on their off-hours. They have intense jobs, but they also have personality traits, habits, and strategies for coping with the inherent nuttiness of their jobs.
And this sister sounds like she doesn't.
I know that's going out on a limb here, because none of us KNOWS the sister except the brother in question. Brother, you need to find out where this started, and what it is inside her that's being fed by this. Is it a need to believe in order and rules, and the ability to enforce them? Or is it something more like a love for physical power, or being an arbiter of other people's fate and freedom?
Cary, there's right...and there's wrong. If she's acting wrong...well...she shouldn't, regardless of whether she's wearing a badge. In fact, even moreso if she wears a badge.
Verelse,
I would like to point out that no soldier wants to come home without honor, but the soldiers who do not at least attempt to come to grips with the logic behind their mission, who seem the most angry when they attack people who oppose the war, are doing their part to keep this miserable mission going.
There is no way to turn a dishonorable war into an honorable one, painful as that is to hear. It's not the soldiers' fault! I think, unlike after Vietnam, the average citizen fully understands the difference between a private or corporal or non-com or an officer, and an elected policymaker. I highly doubt there will be anger or violence directed against those who served.
I believe there should be a great deal of anger towards those who sent them overseas to die for the most cynical and political reasons. Unlike Vietnam, where there was at least the pretense of a strategic rationale behind the war (the Domino Theory, etc), Iraq never made sense.
It's been a combination of war profiteering, greed for oil money (pretty disappointing on that front), DoD contracts, and political idiocy, engineered to take advantage of wounded American pride and a deepseated desire to DO SOMETHING, anything, to someone somewhere, post-9/11.
Verelse, I certainly hope for your son's safe return. And then...after the dust has settled, and maybe once he has some distance from it all, I hope he can understand how the civilian leadership of this nation has betrayed him and his comrades-in-arms. And I hope he becomes part of a solution to the bigger-picture quandary that is American politics.
...there's one person in America who I can pretty much guarantee will not be reading it.
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Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
