Keeping the Peace and Alienating the Public

So far today, the fish guy at Hannaford's supermarket, a receptionist on the phone at my doctor's office and two waitresses where I had lunch all wished me well. The first said, "have a good one," the next said "have a nice day," and the last two wished me "a pleasant evening." These days, it seems like every time you turn around some stranger is telling you to enjoy yourself. Unless, of course, that stranger happens to be a cop, and then it's a whole different ball game: They not only don't wish you a nice day, they try to ruin as much of it as possible as fast as they can.

Last week a friend of mine, a distinguished-looking adult in his mid-fifties, was arrested for the crime of sitting in his car around midnight and talking on his cell phone. In order to make his call safely and not block traffic, he had pulled off the road into a parking lot in front of a small business. Within minutes a police car approached, and the officer informed my friend that he was on private property. In Pleasantville, the cop would have suggested he kindly move on, then gotten back into his patrol car and with a friendly nod and maybe even a wink, driven away.

That is not what happened. What happened is the cop demanded to see my friend's license and registration, perhaps assuming the car was a stolen vehicle. Then, because he smelled alcohol lingering from the one beer ingested not long before the incident, he asked him to get out of the car and walk a straight line. Since my friend suffers from a mild inner ear disorder that affects his balance, he failed that test. Before you could say, "Beat it--the fuzz," the cop slapped some handcuffs on him, threw him in the back of the patrol car and took him "down to the station" for a breathalyzer test. Five hours in a jail cell later, having passed that test he was free to leave and try to come up with the $140 in cash to get his car out of the impound lot.

I thought that was a sad story until I heard from my son who, short on cash and long on attitude, received a $50 ticket for disturbing the peace in Burlington, Vermont because he had snarled at some nosy old coot to "stay out of it," the geezer heckling from the sidelines as the cop was lecturing my son about the biking ban on city streets. That seemed sadder since, by the time you're middle-aged you know the cops suck but in your early twenties you still have time to form a positive opinion of the men in blue.

Ahh, life in these United States...ain't it grand?