If A Tree Falls II
Good morning, y’all. We’re still picking up limbs and what not from the big pine tree that fell last week. The sixty-footer nearly took out the clubhouse with me inside. It’s scary to contemplate that had the wind been blowing a little harder in a more Southwesterly pattern that the tree might have crashed into the clubhouse and sent me on to my final reward. Even at my advanced age and overall creakiness I believe the timing would have been “far too soon”, as they say.
It is customary in my area for folks to thank the great beyond for sparing them from natural disasters while never doling out any responsibility for creating the disaster. I get it, people like to look at the remnants of their neighbor’s home and say “there but for the grace of God, go I.” There is some sort of sanctimonious satisfaction in believing you were spared from malevolence because you’ve led a clean life, or at least better than your neighbors.
My dear Daddy, the late Bocephus Lite use to say, “put wishes in one hand and poop in the other and see which one fills up first.” In that vein I’m not going to keep wishing that the great beyond continues to spare me in future weather events. I’ve decided to dip into my emergency fund and have all of the other tall pines cut down. “The Lord helps those that help themselves” as they say. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, right?
All around the block and we’re finally back to the topic at hand, things we can do, preventative measures we can take to make society work better for everyone. Currently I’m focused on body cams on police. It’s such an obvious innovation that the police should have been begging for them when the first GoPro hit the market. There is no one that wants visual exculpatory evidence more than the innocent.
For an example of where there should have been visual exculpatory evidence, let’s talk about the shooting of Tamir Rice.
Tamir Rice was the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by the Cleveland , Ohio police. Tamir was holding a pellet gun at the time. His death was deemed by the court as “clearly objectively reasonable.” In the surveillance video taken by a camera posted in the park, the child was shot two seconds after the police rolled onto the scene. The two seconds is factual, not my interpretation, and is mind boggling on the surface. Did the police even have the time to say, “Police, put down your weapon!”, in two seconds?
Could they have drawn their guns after arrival at the scene, position themselves in a safe manner and confronted a supposed gunman in two seconds? The video clearly shows that the officer on the passenger side went in with his gun drawn in the car and opened fire immediately.
If body cams had been in play at the time of the shooting of this 12-year-old child, I’m sure we would a have a different finding than, “clearly objectively reasonable.”
Weeding out the unfit for service is what I’m hoping the body cams will do for society. Whether the body cans show that officers are psychologically or physically unfit, the footage needs to be revealed. Society deserves nothing but the best from their police.
If a tree falls in front of a body cam, we’ll hear it.