When I was a kid I was vaguely aware that a lot of other kids were a bunch of whiny assholes. I probably was one as well, to be fair. The funny thing is that I always had this sense that the situation would improve as I got older. I don’t know if it was me being optimistic, or just having faith in the theory of people maturing as time moved on. I suppose there are a lot more examples of people growing up, then not, but it’s the ones where they don’t that stick out in my mind. I’m not going to list off all the times that I thought grown adults acted like 6-year-olds. That would take forever, and I just don’t have that kind of time or attention span. I just want to say that as an adult, I’m disappointed when I see other adults behaving like they just started going to school for the ‘full-day classes’. That said, who am I to judge? What did I think was going to happen? We’re the same exact people that we were when we were 6. Just older. Most of us evolved some, but when the pressure’s on, sometimes that ‘inner 6-year-old’ has to take over and weigh in with his/her opinions and antics. It’s probably too much to expect that we could have completely gotten to a point where that doesn’t come out anymore. Could a world full of mature people even exist? What would that be like? It could be awesome, but maybe it would have its own share of problems that I can’t quite foresee. So…. I guess it’s OK?
Politics is my favorite example. When you read about it in the paper, they use fancy words like conjecture, posturing, and semantics. That’s because there are intelligent people writing about a non-intelligent situation. When you watch some coverage of them operating on TV, and these people are some of the most immature we have in society. The way they argue with each other, airing out their pissy little grievances with their selfish little agendas….. forming their little cliques and alliances….these are the people we depend on to run our towns/cities/provinces/states/countries! It’s disappointing. I don’t normally follow politics for this reason. Every time I feel like I might be interested, there’s some display of foolishness and incompetence that I’d rather just not know about, which drives me away. You know what though? They’re people. Not unlike the people in the first paragraph. Except these people are more interested in power, and they want to be shot callers! Oh sure, there are a few martyrs out there too that just give and give and give themselves for the betterment of society (if that’s what you choose to believe), but at the root of it all, none of these people would have had any interest in politics if it weren’t at least somewhat in their nature to want to be shot-callers. You put a bunch of shot-callers in the same room all day, and make the stakes incredibly high, and what do you get?? Conjecture, posturing, and semantics….. all fucking day! What did we expect?
Finally, there’s a story in Toronto about a police officer who shot a suspect carrying a knife 8 times (on 9 shots) and killed him. I feel like this news story plays different in Canada than it would in the States, but the media is all over the police department for excessive violence. As they should be. There has to be a better way to take down a suspect. The way this has all played out in the media has been totally one-sided though. What happened to a person taking some responsibility for being there with a knife in the first place? Also not dropping it when the police told him to? I don’t know the whole back story, and very little has been mentioned about what was really happening at the time the police arrived, but the victim at very least made a decision to carry a knife that day, and the rest isn’t that important to me. I can’t give him advice now, but I will say this to any of you out there that might get into some shit. If you are wielding a knife, and a bunch of cops are there asking you to put it down, you might not be expecting to die at that moment, but you HAVE to respect the fact that it could happen. That’s just common sense. Right or wrong, police are human beings, and it’s not an automatic that you will just get tasered or shot in the leg. If you make them mad, there’s always a chance that you could get lit up. I want to believe that the police are generally good people. I want to believe that they don’t get into situations like that on purpose. They are just people though. Who knows if you got them into a corner, or underneath their skin enough? Everyone has a breaking point. They carry guns. I have a theory that most cops have violent tendencies. I would think that it’s a bit of a requirement for their job. If you are hoping to never be in any type of altercation, than you aren’t likely to try to become a police officer. There has to be something in your personality which suggests that you wouldn’t mind walking around with a gun, and if push came to shove, you wouldn’t mind using it. If this wasn’t the case, why would you become a cop? Oh, I’m sure just as in the above paragraph that there are some absolute saints who become cops just because they want to help clean up the city. For every one of those, there have to be at least one or two tough guys that would love to carry a gun and be an authority figure. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they’re out there fighting the good fight, but I certainly wouldn’t wave a knife at one of them.
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