The Cult of Cop-dom

  In Lake City Florida recently, a pretty young mother perished in a house fire leaving behind  two  young daughters.  I in no way want to detract from the very real sadness of what happened nor do I want to  downplay the tragedy of loss.  But did I mention she was a police officer?

  That is all our local media mentioned.  She had been a cop for about two months, and the house where the fire occurred wasn’t hers; it belonged to another police officer. She apparently was staying the night and he escaped with minor injuries while she did not. This sort of thing, while very sad is also fairly common.  People have been dying in house fires since people have been building houses, I suppose.  But did I mention she was a police officer?

  Our local news station went on and on with lots of vague pseudo-eulogies from unspecified friends about how brave and noble and committed to the community she was.  She somehow became a hero, and the general tone of the news coverage was as if she had singlehandedly taken down a nest of bank robbers and perished in the aftermath.  The   Lake City Police Department began referring to her as a ’fallen officer’.  A scholarship fund was immediately set up for her children, and she was buried with full police honors, even though she had been on the force for less than 90 days.  There is nothing to indicate she ever  drew her weapon to save an innocent life. She never rushed into a building to save orphans, or anything of the sort.   Yet she is a hero.  Did I mention she was a police officer?

  Please let me be clear. There are two children out there who have been robbed of their mother, and I  don’t want to  cheapen that.  But, take away her uniform, her badge and her gun, and what do you have?  You have a pretty young woman who was spending the night at the house of a man who was not her husband, and who died in a house fire.  The media wouldn’t have given her a story on the last page of the paper.  She wouldn’t have even merited a footnote on their website. Why?  Because the official position of most of society is that a police officer is worth more than an ordinary person.  They may never say it, they may not even think of it that way, but there it is. It is a perception pumped and prodded and propped up by the media, and rarely  questioned.

  It is a common practice here in Georgia when you are pulled over for the police officer to stand almost behind you while they are dealing with you. He stands there, almost in the corner of your eye while he addresses you, the hapless citizen. I asked once if the officer could take a step or two forward where I could see him. ‘Officer safety’ was the reason cited. Well what about my safety?  I basically have a man with a gun standing   behind me, and the fact that he has a uniform and a badge doesn’t change the fact that he is a man with a gun.  Should he bungle this traffic stop, by accident or on purpose, I could die, and the odds are that almost certain that nothing would happen to him.

  Think about this; there are a bunch of men with guns and sticks outside your door kicking and yelling to be let in at 2 a.m.  The normal human reaction would be to barricade yourself in and defend yourself by whatever means eventually become necessary. Nobody in their right mind would simply let a bunch of armed men in and meekly submit to them. Nobody in their right mind would just let the armed men sort through their belongings while barking orders.  But did I mention that they are police officers?

  Let’s say  armed men forced your car off the road and attempted to extract money from you? But did I mention they are police officers? They used to call those  ‘highwaymen’, now they call them ‘highway patrol’.

  See the assumption is that most cops are good people.   That isn’t the point.  Good people or not they enjoy an elevated status in the minds of people, and the system   protects the bad ones with a vengeance.  Is it our best option, with the  armed man behind us, for us to hope he’s one of the’ good ones’? That in itself is scary enough.  But what we have in place is a Cult of Cop-dom.   The police are always right. The police are heroes, even if they have been cops for less than 90 days and die in a house fire. They’re always on duty, and always right, even their dogs.  Cop dogs are smarter than regular dogs, and never give false positives in a very dog-like tendency to want to please their master. Never. They are the best of the best .  They know best.  If you don’t  get that, then you  simply  need to be re-educated.

 The cops wouldn’t just beat on people’s door without a reason, would they? Of course they would. They have in every country that has ever existed.  They would never pull people over for contrived reasons and extract money from them, would they?   Of course they would. Some  places less than others, but the officer enjoys institutional immunity from his actions, and the blind loyalty of members of the Cult.  If the armed men come to your door at 2 in the morning, and you respond by defending your property, you know exactly what will happen. You will die in a hail of gunfire and nightsticks.   When the smoke clears, ‘officer safety’ will be cited, and the machinery rolls on.  What’s worse, your next door neighbor will applaud the bullies in blue and tell all who will listen that ‘cops have a tough job’ and assure doubters that ‘you just don’t understand.’

  What all of us need to understand is that in every encounter with a cop you are taking your life into your own hands.   Know your rights, and be polite, but never forget who you are dealing with. They are not the good guys, and they are not all heroes.   They are a revenue generating arm of the state at best, and trigger happy bullies at worst. If they die in a house fire, or die in a car crash or die of a heart attack, they are no more deserving of lionization and hero worship than any other hapless citizen. Reject the Cult, and in doing so, even if only in your mind, you have begun to   grab back  the most precious  form of your freedom; the freedom of conscience.

"Called to Preach"

  At my church, and by extension the churches that we tend to associate with, I have observed, first hand for quite some time now, a very curious thing.  Let me explain.

  In our circles, there are a lot of young men who claim to be ‘called to preach’.  The way this  works, presumably is that God does some sort of secondary work of grace in the heart and life of this young man, and he is, from that moment on, a ‘preacher’.  He is separated, sanctified, set apart for the work of the gospel.   Those that aren’t  ‘called’  just simply, aren’t called, and are, I guess, free to  continue to sit there.  Oddly enough this calling never seems to happen when the young man is at home reading his Bible or when he is engaging in his private devotional life.  No, this calling only seems to land on a man during a high-pitched emotional church service of one kind or another. It’s very common, after one has been ‘called’, to let everyone else at the meeting know that you’ve been called, with lots of attention and fawning to follow.  Sometimes, as this plays out, the whole family gets involved, with weepy mothers testifying how they can’t believe that God has made one of their boys into a preacher.  As time moves on this young man will often be found on the platform at youth rallies or camp meetings or revival meetings giving an emotional account about how he’s tried to evade ‘the call’. Testimonials will be given as to how God has ‘hemmed him up’, and he has ‘no choice’.  Emotions will flow like water all around.  Some young men continue to work this angle, with the full fawning support of others, well into their 20’s.

  Into this scene strolls me, your friendly neighborhood street preacher.  Aside from the fact that this ‘call’ is an entirely unscriptural concept, I’m always glad to see young men enter the ministry.  We need all the help we can get.  But what I’ve seen, more often than not is that these young preachers don’t do much preaching.  Oh, they will dash to a youth meeting or a preacher’s fellowship where they can tell everyone what they have been called to do; I just don’t see them actually doing it.  In fact, I have seen them pass up opportunities to preach over and over again. One would assume that a young man so called would look for any chance to do what God has called him to do. One would assume that he would   hunger and thirst after righteousness, that he would study his Bible with a new intensity; that the affections for worldly things would slack off. Alas, I have seen precious little of this.

  I have literally gone to one or two of these young men and said “I know where you can preach to thousands of people” to which they will reply “Well, that’s great, but I’m sort of waiting for a church to call me for a revival meeting.”  In other words, they will preach to a voluntary audience, but not an involuntary one.  They will take the pats on the back from people who already agree with them, they won’t suffer the reproaches of ministering outside the camp.  When confronted with my analysis of this trend in their lives, they will fall back on the “God hasn’t called me to that” while simultaneously claiming that God has called them to “preach the gospel”.  Who, pray tell, needs the gospel more, the church crowd or the lost crowd? Did God say “Go ye into all the church and preach the gospel”?

  When the time comes to go knock doors, where are the young men so burdened to reach the lost?

  Furthermore when opportunities rise up inside the church, even those chances are passed up.  Our church has a prayer meeting every Saturday night where somebody will usually get up for 10 minutes or so and preach for a few minutes about something God has showed them out of the Bible before we pray. The ‘preacher boy’ crowd is rarely there and  very very rarely has anything to say.  This strikes me as strange, and always has.  We rodeoed a bunch of the preacher boys to come work over in children’s church with us. I watched them bomb out one after another before an audience of little kids.  Strange stuff indeed for somebody who has been ‘set apart’ for the ministry.

  In the church where I got saved, it was sort of assumed that after you got saved, you would find some sort of outreach ministry to be a part of.   I don’t know of anybody who didn’t. The ministry wasn’t a club of suit-wearing, fried chicken eating men who only preach to each other and people who already agree with them, and it never has been. If you’re saved, you’re in the ministry whether you choose to participate or not.  There is no secondary calling in scripture. You’re not above the people you minister to no more than you are above the people you minister with. You’re not part of a club, you are a part of the body of Christ and as such, whether you are young or old,  male or female, you ought to  look for and seize every opportunity to minister. If you don’t, you’ll just have to forgive me for doubting your calling.  Or am I being too harsh?

Scary Conversations

   It  really is a  scary time to  be an American, and the scary part isn’t  where I thought I would find it.  Let me explain.

  Decades of government school indoctrination and electronic media  ‘programming’ have  apparently  rendered most of my fellow citizenry incapable of  critical thinking.  That’s the only explanation I can muster for the  visceral and entirely predictable reactions that I see on display as people consume the news cycle. Like Orwell’s 2 Minute Hate, they have been conditioned to give reaction A when stimulus A is presented.  Interestingly the control mechanism takes it one step further and subdivides its subjects into small groups. These groups   call themselves various names, like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, names assigned to them by the control mechanism.  Everybody in the group knows what their reaction should be, and people that don’t react the way the group should must belong to some other group, and are probably the enemy.  Assumptions must never be questioned, and root causes never considered. At the very least, opinions that deviate outside the   programmed responses are suspect, and maybe even ‘un-American’.  In doing so, the control mechanism masterfully limits the possible opinions to just a handful, and keeps people suspicious of each other all in one fell swoop.  In a frankly brilliant piece of misdirection, the suspicions is removed from the control mechanism and cast onto people who are similarly being controlled.

  Now that I’ve laid that out, let me apply it to a real –life situation.  I am sitting around a table with 4 or 5 other people when a news items comes on about the Guantanamo detainees.  The other people are prior military like myself, and would consider themselves ‘conservative’.   The news item mentions some unpleasant fact about the conditions at  ‘Gitmo’ , of which there are a whole slew to choose from, and the  visceral reactions start.

  “Stupid liberal news media”

  “They should have just killed those guys”

  “ Yeah, I don’t know why we’re bothering to give them a trial. Just shoot ‘em, I say.”

  Now these are well-traveled waters for me, and though not particularly bright in most areas, but I am curious as to how people arrive at their assumptions, so I ask.

“Why do you say that?”

Already I’m straining at the outside of the box. “Because they are terrorists.”

“According to who?”

“The military, you know, the government.”

“Ever known them to be wrong?”

 I can see the hostility start to bubble up.  I’m questioning the narrative, and  people haven’t been taught  anymore how to process that.  There’s a bit of an edge in their voice as they answer.

“Look those  guys  took up arms against our military. They were captured on the battlefield, and  since we’re at war, they ought  just be executed.”

  “Do you know that, or have you just been told that by their captors?  How do you know those guys weren’t ratted out by their neighbor and snatched out of their bed in the middle of the night?  How do you know it’s not mistaken identity? The truth is, we don’t know how those guys were captured,  or under what conditions. All we know is that the government, who we all agree can’t be trusted, says they are bad guys.”

  “ Oh sure, I  see where you’re going. You   want all these   terrorists to have a trial. You want them to have lawyers and rights. You want them coddled.”

  “ I want them treated as human beings, yes.”

 “Terrorists don’t have any rights.”

  “Well according to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, everybody has rights.  And everybody gets a trial regardless of the accusation.”

  By now I have stepped too far outside the box, and the name-calling starts, along with the questioning of loyalties.  I am accused of wanting buildings to blow up, murderers to walk free and all sorts of other silliness.  In a weird slant that seems to happen a lot with this group, I am accused of wanting illegal immigrants to ‘drink the country dry’, whatever that means.  It’s a dizzying assault of straw men and  clichés.  But think for a second about the bigger picture; if you are accused of the right crime by the right people, your fellow citizens will cheer your march to the gallows and never even question whether or not you should be there.

  I personally would be horrified to be snatched up in the middle of the night, taken to a cell, denied counsel, and kept there for years.  I could easily be waterboarded and undergo sensory deprivation without ever being charged with a crime. My family would have no idea where I was, and the military would deny having me in custody. When and if I finally got a trial, I would be horrified to learn that all the information the prosecution has against me has been deemed ‘classified’ and my lawyer can’t see it to prepare a defense.  This is  Soviet show trial justice on a level  they never even dreamed of, , but it would be hard for my cries to be heard over the roar of applause from the manipulated sheep who are so glad that he world is a little bit safer without me in it.  They would cheer on the ‘heroes’ who slip the noose around my neck.  Not only could this happen, it has happened, and is happening.

  I want the Gitmo prisoners to receive a trial not because of any affection I have for them, but rather because we are supposed to be the good guys!

 How in the world did we get here, and how do we get back?

The Good Guy Wins For a Change

 As a public minister, I often find myself at the tip of the spear when it comes to the First Amendment.   Most law enforcement  are woefully ill-informed of the laws they are supposed to be enforcing, and any person who shares their faith whether it be  public preaching , sign carrying or the distribution of  gospel materials, may eventually find themselves in the crosshairs of the local police.

  James Battle is just such a person. A resident of the Tucson area, James was in the downtown Tucson bus terminal on April 24, 2013. He was waiting for his wife so that both of them could take a bus home. While waiting, he reasoned that this would be an excellent opportunity to share his faith with interested people who are also waiting for their bus. He traveled up and down the terminal, which is public property, with informational Christian tracts sticking out of his shirt pocket. By his own testimony, he didn’t approach anyone and he certainly didn’t cause a disturbance. He simply made the information available to any interested parties. If they were interested, he would hand them some information and engage them in conversation if they were so inclined.

  He was approached by Tucson Police Officer Keith Atchley who told him that he couldn’t distribute any materials without written permission from Sun Tran the company that owns the buses. While this was being discussed a Sun Tran official came on the scene and affirmed that ‘solicitation’ was not allowed.  James assured them he wasn’t soliciting and since he was on public property, he was well within his rights to continue with what he was doing. But to appease the Officer and the Sun Tran official, Mr. Battle offered to let people take the literature from his pocket rather than hand it to them. It’s unclear from the reports whether or not this arrangement was agreed upon, but by all indications, the officer and the Sun Tran official both left.

  Officer Atchley, according to his own report, watched Mr. Battle through binoculars until he was observed once again committing the heinous crime of handing a piece of paper to another human being.   The report also says that Mr. Battle engaged a person in conversation and allowed  several people to take   literature from his shirt pocket.  Tucson’s finest  swooped in, telling James Battle “You’re the problem”.   He was charged with criminal trespassing and ‘field released’ after signing a ticket.  As an aside, the officer appears to have violated the parameters of arrest under the criminal trespass law which would make this an incident of false arrest.  James was ordered to leave the bus terminal or face incarceration even though he needed the bus to get home.

  Now if this fine example of police work were where the story ended, it would just be another day of ‘protecting and serving’ in Tucson.  Officer Atchley could shine his badge some, confident that he was keeping the streets safe from pieces of paper. But James Battle contacted the Center for Religious Expression who fired off a letter to both the Chief of Police Villasenior and Daryl Cole of the Tucson Transportation Department. In the letter Counselor Nate Kellum laid out the case for James Battle’s right to continue his activities. They cited multiple court cases at various levels and assured the recipients, that unless this issue was dealt with properly, legal  action would be soon to follow.

  The City Attorney of Tucson responded with  a letter,which you really need to read in it’s entiretyin order to appreciate.  After calling it an ‘alleged encounter’ ,which oddly enough  generated a very real police report  written by a very real  Officer, the bureaucracy buckled. They apologized. They wanted to assure Mr. Battle that he is “welcome to return and continue his expressive activity”.  They offer to help him coordinate future activities.  They proclaimed to the world that they “value” Mr. Battle’s business.   They offer two different phone numbers by which he can get any future clarification. They seem almost on the verge of offering him free piggy back rides.

  Now the reason this encounter ( sorry, alleged encounter) turned out so differently than it could have is because, although not a rabble-rouser, James Battle knew what his rights are.  He stood  his ground and used the rule of law and the Constitution to  make his case for him.  As law enforcement becomes increasingly about  political correctness and revenue generation and  decreasingly about the  protection of individual liberties, there is a lesson to be learned here.  The chances are you will have a police encounter sooner  or later, and when you do will you be ready?