| |         Ah, the joys of living in New Jersey! Perhaps it is my lack of having spent extensive time in other parts of America, but based upon where I have been and what I've seen, New Jersey has THE most psychotic drivers in the nation. I see this in the hours between six and eight ayem as people scramble to get to work or to get the little bastards to school. Virtually everyone behind a steering wheel has left sanity and caution at home; virtually every one of these beknighted fools will drive fifty to sixty miles an hour in twenty-five-mile-an hour zones in an effort to beat a traffic light or to merely get ahead of whoever is in front of them. Very few people use turn signals; quite a number of these so-called drivers will run stop signs, red lights and have no qualms about going the wrong way on one way streets. Should you be foolhardy enough to get onto an Interstate highway, people will be driving between eighty and one hundred miles an hour. Where are the state troopers? Hiding, if they have any common sense! To be fair to the brothers in blue, though, they do spend considerable time pulling over the very worst of the speeders and careless drivers who cross their path. And this is when they aren't disentangling cars and bodies from multi-vehicle disasters. One night about five months ago I saw seven separate accidents along Interstate 80 westbound; each involved quite a few cars and in two instances, buses and trucks. As I had to return more or less the way that I'd come, I took a different road, thinking that I would avoid the congestion the afore-mentioned seven pile-ups had caused. Ah, silly old hippie! On this highway there had been three MORE accidents and traffic was being diverted to side streets. We were moving slowly enough that I was able to talk with one police officer for a few moments; he described the situation as "another god damned bloodbath." He was visibly upset and I had to move on.
A lot of people piss and moan about "the cops," but it's convenient to forget that if old Missus Johnson hasn't been seen for ten days and there's a stench coming out from under her door, it's always a policeman who has to go in to see just how badly she's decomposed. It's also the police who have to scrape up the remnants of people who drank and wound up smeared all over a bridge abutment; the police who have to break into the midst of a "domestic violence" occurence, meaning, when a husband has gotten drunk and beaten his wife or raped his children. To me, the police are like the barrel of apples analogy: one or two SOBs will make the whole profession look bad, which is a shame. During the late 1960s the police generally made my life miserable because I had long hair and dressed funny, so for a long time I held a blanket grudge against them. But this sweeping job that I have threw me out there for the whole night, on into the morning hours, and it was often that the only people I'd see and talk to were those officers who'd stopped to pick up a roll and coffee and maybe the morning paper. I learned that most of them are really decent people, bordering on selfless (as opposed to selfish); good humored, patient. Why do people join the police force? There are a few who have the misguided notion that they are gonna outdo Dick Tracy in catching crooks, but the majority of the women and men I've spoken to over the last twenty years became cops to give back to community in which they live.
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| | Posted 10/26/2009 11:19 AM - 1 View - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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