Hubris

I approach this subject with trepidation. Many years ago, before he was a senator (and he represented North Carolina in the US Senate for 38 years), I was asked to introduce Senator Jesse Helms at a law enforcement appreciation dinner. Helms had become a very famous radio personality, outstanding public speaker. He had interviewed me, and I admired him greatly.

In my introduction, I remember that I said, “law enforcement is the only thing that separates the hard-working, god-fearing, tax-paying citizens of this country from chaos.” I remember later, he whispered to me, “in your lifetime, you will see law enforcement change totally.” He was right, in my lifetime, I have seen it change, mostly for the worst.

My father had two uncles in law enforcement, my grandmother's brothers. One, Lloyd Lucas, was a sheriff in a nearby county, I remember as a small child, walking with my father and he, my uncle speaking with disdain to every black person he met on the street (how things have changed, today the sheriff, usually Democrat, considers every black person his main source of votes).

Another uncle, Ernest Lucas, was a member of the secret service during the Hoover and FDR administrations. I remember him telling my father how much FDR hated the blacks, and how they would take him into a large parking garage in Manhattan, and strip him of his wet clothes during a parade, because he always rode in an open car, even in the rain (scared of being assassinated).

My mother's cousin, the greatest bully-police officer the world has ever known, Tom Garris. In his city, Detective Garris made life for miserable for the blacks and poor whites, as well as his own family. Life crushed by this obstinate father, his own son committed suicide.

As a college student, in the summer, I lived in a boarding house with one highway patrolmen (Brunswick county) who bragged how he would take young women in the woods for sex to keep him giving them a citation. Of course, today's Democrat party, considers all law enforcement as their protected “covey”.

After the war, with some sight still in my left eye, enough to drive. Traveling from the army hospital in Fort McClellan, Alabama, I was stopped by a SC highway patrolmen, outside Georgetown, South Carolina. This patrolman kept me for one hour at a service station, trying to get a service station man to cash my check because he was a determined to collect money from me on the highway.Of course, with this as well as the Brunswick county incidents, I had written authorities; nothing was done.

In recent years, more blatant examples, matters I have discussed on talk radio, such as drug activity in a building I own, transporting a weapon in my camera bag. If interested, law enforcement would have anxiously interviewed me about such. The telephone wires to my house were cut, disabling my security system; both local police and sheriff's deputies said that only in the event of my death would any investigation take place.

Sgt. Buster Yotes, in uniform, came to my house and told me to stay in my house with the doors locked, not to walk on the streets. You see, the disabled blind veteran is not allowed to get exercise and sunshine while the criminals have access to the streets. As I have said on the radio, those of you not interested now about my imprisonment, will get interested after you are imprisoned in your own house.

With every incident involving law enforcement, the break-in and trashing of two of my buildings, talking with a young man who had been in prison, one of my drivers having been “nailed by a traffic light camera”; I become more convinced of the bullying and conniving of law enforcement. I become more convinced of the lack of integrity in law enforcement.

Citizens have been taxed to the limits, it is now a matter of fees and fines. The most lucrative sources of this income has become the so-called red-light cameras, it takes few employees, pays such large dividends, particularly to the company that manufactures and operates them. Like girl scout uniforms which are now manufactured in China, so these cameras are now manufactured there. With the increased traffic problems, particularly at intersections, cities have found a gold mine in frustrated drivers.

Regardless of who you voted for, November 2nd represented a major win for everyone who opposes the use of red light cameras. In a handful of pockets across the nation, voters decided they were sick of the automated machines and by voting against the use of these devices, sent a message to law enforcement, as well as the companies that manufacture red light cameras...Many feel that red light cameras even represent a violation of our constitutional rights. On election day, cities and districts across the nation decided to ban the use of these cameras, adding to a growing list of towns that have already voted to do so.

Dalton, Georgia, the country's largest carpet manufacturing city, have dumped the red-light cameras. The felonious assertion and sales-pitch about preventing accidents and saving lives has proven to be an absurdity...just another pick-pocket exercise by law enforcement. Tyranny always starts with a police state, usually combining military forces with state police. This is happening rapidly in America. The greatest problem is not in the quantity of military and police forces, but the quality of individuals selected for enforcement. We know that this is not a job for the sissy intellectual, but neither is it a job for the bullying, sadistic roughneck. In the early American family, faith and decency came first, a father would take a bullet for a child, a father would never have allowed his child to be naked-scanned at an airport; his wife or his son to be fondled by police, TSA employees. Today's mothers, working full time jobs, homemakers, caring for children, do not have the time or neurology for the sadistic abuse of law enforcement officers.

The Tea Party movement is about 20 years too late, many of us have written and talked about the inequities of government for a long time. Our fellow citizens just yawned and thought we were “nuts” at best, and “conspiracy theorists” at worst. Welcome to the knowledge that your government, your police forces, while you were asleep, have geared up to enslave you. After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as life wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.