Mr. Policeman, Your Friend

Corruption has a way of coming back like weeds. When it is the government that is corrupt, it is especially hard to weed the garden. Here's a sad story:



When I was a kid living in Tucson, the town of South Tucson, a tiny municipality fully surrounded by the city of Tucson, was notorious as a speed trap. The municipality used deceptive signs and over zealous "enforcement" to extract speeding fines from the innocents. It was outrageous enough to get national media coverage. It didn't stop it.

I also remember my parents being stopped on a cross country drive when their car was hit by a car that drove from a side road onto a national highway. My father walked a half block away to a phone on the other side of the highway to a telephone to report the accident. He was ticketed for "leaving the scene of an accident" and the car was impounded. Our family had to get to the destination on a bus. The ticket and the seizure were the actions of a small Texas town to extort inter-state motorists.

So stories like the above are not rare. Sadly those stories go on.

You can weed the garden, but with the next rain shower they sprout up again. There's a say... the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance. Sadly too many right wing nuts want to purvey the idea that government is always right. They want to paint all protest as criminal and put public officials on a pedestal. But the reality is that while there are many honest public servants, there are too many crooked one and the only way you keep the weeds down is by constantly weeding the garden.