"never again"

     I have a theory about the police-violence problem we have in this country.

     But it's a bigger "umbrella" -- not just about police.

     From what I've observed over my lifetime so far, it appears that back in earlier times -- mid-twentieth-century -- people who were horrible bullies perpetrated most of their crap at home, on their families.  ("Nice."  Ugh.)

     Domestic violence, and maybe some bar-fights, was where the horrible behavior was worked out.
     Back in the day law enforcement, reflecting society in general, turned a blind eye to domestic violence.

     However, over the decades from the 1970s to the 1990s, society's position evolved, and now you can call the police about domestic violence and they will make it stop, and the abuser will be held accountable for his or her behavior and its results.






    And so, what appears to have happened, in response to this societal shift, is -- bullies and abusers have brought their horrible behavior into workplaces.


     Think about it:  when they do their stuff at home, they can wind up arrested and divorced.  Big inconvenience.  When they do it at work -- what happens?  Often -- nothing.  Society now turns the blind eye to workplace mischief, the way it used to turn a blind eye to domestic violence.



     In some workplaces, the behavior is expressed as emotional violence, verbal abuse, yelling, sabotaging co-workers, harassing, stalking, general "troublemaking"....  And when the workplace happens to be a police station, the behavior may manifest as murder of citizens....  George Floyd, etc.

     What other job is there besides police officer where you can murder someone and not only not get prosecuted, but get rewarded with a paid vacation ("suspension with pay")?



     I wonder if -- because of these evolving circumstances and attitudes of our society -- police forces across the country have unwittingly become magnets for psychopaths who see it as the perfect outlet for their horrible, abusive behavior?

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A memory from a long time ago stays in my mind, hazy and undetailed:  I would have been kindergarten age, or first or second grade -- somewhere in there -- and I lived in a little town in Ohio.  

Every Sunday we had church, and I had Sunday school -- my Sunday school teacher was a young woman -- I remember her as nice and gentle, with fair skin and light brown curly hair, and a small, thin voice.


     One Sunday we couldn't have Sunday school in my grade level because our Sunday school teacher was not at church.  
     My mother told me something generalized and vague about why our teacher was not at church that day -- something about "trouble at home" and my mom said, with memorable weight to her words, "It's very sad when that happens."



     The memory stayed in my mind -- buried far back under other info -- for decades, and the impression I had, at that young age, was that my Sunday school teacher had to split up with her husband in the middle of the night and couldn't make it to church in the morning, for that reason.

     Taking that memory out now, and re-examining it, I realize people probably don't call their divorce lawyers at 4:00 or 6:00 on Sunday morning, or at 11:00 Saturday night -- it was likely a case of domestic violence, only we didn't have that phrase back then, and I as a little kid had never heard of grown-ups hitting one another at home.  That was outside my area of expertise.

     "It's very sad when that happens" was all I knew about it then.

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     Our society is going to have to progress to a point where we reject and exclude horrible behavior by narcissistic abusers in every context -- home, work, wherever....

     I think we are in that process.

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