Quintessence

One thing surgeons and serial killers have in common is that people who are squeamish about the sight of blood are that much less likely to become either one. Similarly, one thing police officers have in common with humanity's biggest bungholes is that both tend to be comfortable asserting authority. If you're not the kind of person who can do that, you might have other faults, but there's a glass ceiling separating you from the pinnacle of obnoxiousness. It also limits your career potential in law enforcement.

At this point, it would be easy for you to get the wrong impression. This is not an anti-police officer piece. Quite the opposite actually; as I write this, I'm caught up in a burst of impatience at how deeply and powerfully the anti-police officer feelings run in this town.

Eugene is a town of aging hippies. By and large, hippies don't warm up to people in uniforms who tell them what they may and may not do. Plus, some hippies, although not quite all, gravitate toward recreational activities that are very illegal. Eugene is also a town with a critical mass of citizens that identify themselves politically as left-wing. For that reason, they're very skeptical of appeals to law and order, and believe police activity usually is orchestrated, and almost entirely behind the scenes, to benefit those who have spent many generations in the wealthy and powerful class, and intend to stay there and to keep out anyone who looks, thinks, or lives differently. And Eugene is a college town. The traditional college-age population is finely situated to be anti-police for the same reason that so many of them go through a rough patch with their parents: they feel ready for complete autonomy, but chafe under the last bits of parental authority, and the friction between those two states builds and builds until something gives.

The output of the above factors, and probably a few others I haven't considered, is a seemingly endless flood of anti-police invective. Lots and lots of people here in this town hate the police. All police. And that goes hurtling past silly, far into the realm of the outright asinine.

Not all police officers are bullies. Not all police officers have a dysfunctional need to give orders, intimidate, demonstrate their power; far from all of them do. But too many of my neighbors and associates put on a convincing imitation of two year olds who fear and hate being vaccinated: they've got a keen memory of a few incidents that involved pain, and they therefore refuse to grapple with the reality that one moment of unpleasantness is probably a small price to pay for protection against a slow death, quite likely dragged through racking, lingering, hellish torment. Two year olds are shortsighted because they're two years old. But at some point, the two year old worldview has to give way, one hopes, to adulthood.

Even given occasions when a police officer behaves badly, it's just absurd to conclude that that police officer, let alone all police officers, carries that as a deeply engraved personality trait. Police work is grueling, and the bad days are unimaginable. A police officer who's gruff during a traffic stop may still be shaking from their own brush with mortality, while grieving the recent loss to violent death of a good friend, or even several good friends. I know how much of my civility I misplace after a day when students have talked back to me, or even just been sluggish in class, so I don't feel as though I'm in any position to hold them to a standard that's ridiculously higher when their working conditions are ridiculously more stressful.

And yes, obviously there are bad police officers. There are also bad plumbers, bus drivers, house painters, pastors, and weasel shavers. But not nearly as many people are willing to condemn those entire professions based on nothing but a few experiences, backed up with images on TV and the trash talk of immature friends. (Well, maybe pastors, but not the rest.)

The funny thing I'm left wondering is whether this marks the beginning of a swing back to where I started my adult life. I came out of high school far more conservative, politically, than ninety-nine out of a hundred people you'll ever meet. But the lifeblood of my education, from secondary to higher to postgraduate, was in debate, and I was slingshotted to the extreme opposite just by the painful experience of listening to arguments made badly. I went to Baylor, which was a pretty inbred nest of conservative thought, and it was like what I imagine musicians must suffer, having to listen to their favorite music being played sloppily and off-key for year after agonizing year. It soured me on what I'd originally believed. I've since maintained that I'm not really pro-Republican or pro-Democrat, not really pro-liberal or pro-conservative, but rather that I'm anti-bad argument. Throughout most of the Rush Limbaugh era, the boldest and most shameless blast of really embarrassingly bad arguments has come from the right, and that has kept me pinned against the opposite wing of politics. But it looks as though living in Eugene is starting to change that.

To an extent, I'll admit, I think this points to how much growing up I still have to do. The truth is that most of the musicians I know actually seem very patient with bad singers and performers. They apparently have the wisdom and kindness to rejoice at others' enjoyment, and to tame their own prissiness and pedantry enough to look past failures of execution to the overflowing heart that motivated the music. If I were a better person, I would be equally pleased to see the passionate engagement and boldness that drives people to enter into substantive conversation and at least attempt to stake out a defensible position. But that might be one of the marks that years in academia has left on me: hearing badly-made arguments still repels me. It doesn't say good things about my allegiance to the truth, but it's a consistent pattern.

Have to wait and see where it sends me next, now that I'm here.