Monday, October 18, 2021

Why are cops afraid of vaccines?


     Boy, is it beautiful up in Door County. The wife and I had a great time there last week, hiking the parks, going to fish boils. I tried not to think about being right back here Monday morning, poking Chicago’s ball-of-snakes politics with a stick.
     Oh look. The city and the police department are suing each other. That’s normal.
     So let’s talk about the police. Puff aside the fog of BS swirling around them and get down to basics. What is the most important activity performed by the police? The reason for the roll calls and the paperwork. What does everyone, including the police themselves, agree that police are supposed to do?
     Fight crime, right? Any objections? Is the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7 on board with the whole police-are-supposed-to-arrest-criminals idea? Assuming so — a leap of trust nowadays with anything requiring an ounce of sense — let’s continue.
     This crime-fighting business involves danger, does it not? Puts police in perilous situations. Running into a dark alley where there might be a bad guy with a gun. Charging up the dark stairs of a six-flat. Going into the foul, overheated apartment of some crazy person who might come at you with a razor.
     A dangerous job. If I say, “Chicago cops put their lives on the line every day,” I don’t expect John Catanzara to jump onto YouTube to insist, “No we don’t!”
     So what’s with the vaccine hesitancy? You’ll run into a burning building but won’t get the shots that soon every 5-year-old will need in order to go to school? You let the city tell you what kind of hat to wear, but helping fight the plague that has killed 700,000 Americans is a bridge too far. Why?

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7 comments:

  1. Cops have the attitude that they are the Law!
    And no on tells them what to do.
    Living in Chicago, I see Chicago cops run red lights & stop signs all day long, because they can. They're not on an emergency call, they just do it & exactly who is going to ticket them?
    Watching the average cop at a crime scene or a traffic mess & you see, they just haven't the faintest idea what to do, so they look busy & usually make a bigger mess out of the traffic mess than there was.
    Most are physically brave, but apparently they're scared of tiny needles & my three vaccine jabs barely hurt going in, but there was upper arm pain for a couple of days, which Tylenol took care of.

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  2. It’s not just the cops. It’s just more profound as Neil illustrates.
    You’ll hear the nonsensical excuses that they use when they really are saying, “I don’t want government telling me what to do.” They’ve been emboldened by Trump and his sheep.
    To me it is becoming more clear that what is happening is an extension of the Civil War that has never really ended.
    It’s a form of terrorism.

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  3. My first reaction to this rock-headed stubborn resistance to common sense was to suggest regarding the police as a sort of military organization, in which dissent just isn't allowed. An order is issued, a positive response is expected and demanded. However, a memory of my own military service came to mind in which that wasn't exactly so: when I was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Training Center some 50 years ago, an order came down from on high that we were to pee in large buckets (apparently so a pharmaceutical company could extract a substance useful in treating heart disease) and using a urinal would be considered an offense. It didn't bother me to pee wherever I was told to pee, but some rockheads thought differently and disobeyed that order even though obeying it would have no negative consequences whatsoever and getting caught disobeying would make the offender subject to court martial and discharge from the service. No matter how long I live, I doubt that I will ever be able to fathom human nature...even a little bit.

    john

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  4. "Five times as many officers, nationwide, have died of COVID since the pandemic began than have been shot to death."

    That alone should end the discussion. Well, and the fact that these guys have joined an organization with lots and lots of rules, of which getting a vaccine is really a pretty minor example. Whatever else one thinks about the situation, the fifth-grade philosophy of "You're not the boss of me" being the deciding factor for a police officer to not get a safe, effective, life-saving vaccine seems like quite the head-scratcher. Of course, that's assuming a "'rational cop.' Ah, ahahahahaha."

    https://twitter.com/Giannoulias/status/1448276169988710407

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  5. One of my landlords in the town where I went to college was a town cop. When he was off-duty, he was an abusive slob. He drank and he treated his spouse and young kids quite badly. I lived upstairs and I could hear every tirade and every obscenity. Ironically, he had also been a suburban firefighter in my hometown, at the firehouse in my old neighborhood. I didn't know him when I was a kid.

    But then he moved to my college town. They gave this big dumb oaf a badge and a gun and told him to enforce the law and to kick some ass. He would rant about commies and hippies and about wanting to shoot blacks if they ever walked on his lawn.

    After Kent State, there was trouble. One violent night, I saw him on the street, helmeted and in riot gear, and carrying a three-foot-long club. Big as a grizzly bear--and just as dangerous. I made sure that he didn't see me.

    That was half-a-century ago, and I'm sure he's no longer with us, but he wouldn't have gotten the jab, either. He was obviously so underpaid that he had to rent out his upstairs rooms to students. He and his young wife and kids lived on the first floor, and down in the basement, where he'd have easily spread the virus to his family.

    He was one of the right-wing sheeple because he had a cop mentality. But mostly, he was just dumb and brutish and very ignorant. I think a lot of today's cops are still like that, no matter how big or small their jurisdictions are. But they were that way long before Orangy the Clown.

    It floors me that they'll face down a bad guy with a gun to save lives, but won't get vaccinated in order to save their own. It's not only their loyalty to Orangy...it's their own stupidity. And mostly the code of machismo they live and die by. You can't be a cop without it.

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  6. I've learned from that well known expert in communicable disease Senator Johnson of Wisconsin that the curious notion of warding off sickness by injecting poisonous substances said to kill life forms too tiny to see with the naked eye took hold in the 19th century, thereby replacing such well established mitigations as keeping the windows sealed against the foul night air and avoiding the poisonous fruit of the tomato plant.

    Actually, the FOP's position doesn't seem to be strictly anti vaccination as much as wanting the matter to be a matter of contract negotiation, which of course would give them opportunities to win concessions on other matters. But if they do have a legitimate case their their leader has undermined it by his offish behavior. One hopes the Mayor stands her ground and the courts back her up.

    On the dangerous life of a policeman, it is true that American cops face risks those of other first world countries don't because of our ridiculous oversupply of guns, but policing is far from the most dangerous occupation.

    Tom

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    Replies
    1. doesn't even make the top 20:

      https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-united-states

      Delete

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