Born a 10th generation Oregonian, (5 generations on each side) I have an enthusiasm for learning and teaching new things. After a ten year mini career in the dental field I moved on to research and embraced the social web. Though the internet is far too large for any one person to claim to be an expert, I can hold my own with the latest trends.
I enjoy researching and writing blogs. As the "Internet Program Director" for myMotherLode.com since 2008, I update the website and have a wide variety of interests. There is always something entertaining, educational or inspirational to share.
Broad change in policing policy is called for nationally especially after the killings of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, the most recent and extreme examples of police use of excessive force. Eliminate choke holds? Maybe. Do away with “No Knock Warrants”? Not a good idea given that they are granted when the situation could result in the destruction of evidence or harm to the officers themselves. Elimination of qualified immunity for the arresting officer? Absolutely not unless you want to completely neuter the response of the police to a dangerous situation. You can still pursue criminal charges if warranted. Let’s instead focus on better training in the use of lethal force; and, for those with complaints against them, enact something akin to a “Three Strikes Rule” that even the unions cannot overrule.
Sam Ewing claims that “Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
Today, let’s recall the words of journalist and cultural critic H.L. Mencken: “We must be willing to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without.”
Interesting side note to the statue in Washington entitled “Emancipation” that special interest groups want to remove; it was voluntarily paid for by black Freedmen moved by the assassination of Lincoln. And while we’re on the subject, where is Joe Biden or the Democratic leadership in condemning the ignorance of tearing down statues honoring our Founding Fathers, the distinguished black Union regiment of the Civil War or that of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg.
Journalist and historian Herbert Agar believed that “Every civilization rests on a set of promises…if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend upon the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.”
Back before Democrats vilified capitalism, or rioters destroyed businesses regardless who owned it, it was Democratic Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey who said: “Much of our American progress has been the product of the individual who had an idea; pursued it; fashioned it; clung to it against all odds; and then profited from it.”
“The keynote of progress,” American businessman and philanthropist Edward A Filene reminds us, “is not merely doing away with what is bad; it is replacing the best with something better.”
It’s interesting to note that while protestors here at home in our major and minor cities destroyed private property and public monuments while restricting the rights of others by their actions, protestors in Hong Kong have been observed waving an American Flag as a symbol of freedom.
