police

I love and support Police. I despise their quotas and the system of issuing traffic tickets. It is unfair, unkind, and truly unjust. I constantly see unsafe drivers, yet they receive no repercussions. Because the rodeo has begun and it is the end of the month, my husband got pulled over while exiting the highway… for going 60 miles per hour as he exited onto the feeder road. And he was given a ticket straight up for it.

What makes it worse is that half the information on the ticket isn’t even correct. It wasn’t daytime, it wasn’t medium traffic (it was 10:21pm and there were very few cars out), and his license plate is not even similar to the one listed. So, the officer didn’t even take the time to put the correct information. The entire pull-over process was completed within four minutes, from lights on to the officer completely gone.

Given that today is the last day of the month, all this information had us both wondering how many exact same tickets the officer gave today from that same location, getting people as they exited the highway, so they effectively would be speeding on the feeder road for three-to-five seconds.

But don’t worry about all the drunk drivers leaving the rodeo or the folks driving high, actively smoking in the car as they drive. Just be sure to meet those quotas. And then deny that they exist.

It is not justice… it just isn’t.

It really hurts to see a system so terribly implemented by an organization created to do good in society, to promote and to give safety and justice. Instead, they give $500 traffic tickets to people who have been actively working on driving not with traffic when traffic inevitably speeds, and who have just lost their jobs and can’t afford such a price. And they don’t bother pulling over the fancy cars, because those always get out of paying the ticket… which they actually can afford financially. So, we have inflated tickets prices for folks who can’t afford it, and most of the bad drivers never even see them, anyway. Ugh…

God, give us all justice, please, and help us to help each other alway to be better. Help us al to pursue and fulfill your will and give your justice and love on Earth. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2024

Smugglers

I prefer that term to the one actually used, traffickers, as the term used makes me think painfully of human and child versions of it. Super sore subject for me, which only increases the pain of the actual topic at hand.

Anyway, we crossed a National Geographic show that was a documentary-esque suspense-injected show following federal police at airports in Peru and Italy who track and aim to prevent drug trafficking. At first, it was really cool to see the police work and to work so well. But it eventually just became increasingly sad – all the people involved in the trafficking have miserably sad problems that led them to make the smuggling attempt in the first place. Most of them were convinced by some outside source that it would work and that they would receive enough money from that someone afterward that would solve some major problem in their lives. In a way, advantage was taken of them, and some even were conned into doing it.

These people’s lives are then directed to years in prison, the single instance of drug transfer is stopped, and the origins of the drugs in the first place are left practically untouched. So, it may make things a bit tougher for the drug organizations to distribute their drugs around the globe, but what do they truly care about a small amount stopped at an airport? It cost them only that small amount, and the people imprisoned were no skin off their backs. They likely will find more sad and desperate people to take the risk the next day, again and again.

The cycle is not stopped, only disturbed with a small ripple.

The one consolation I had – that they may at least have a place to live with food and water once imprisoned, keeping them off the streets and from utter poverty – was dashed at the mention of the high likelihood that they might be “removed permanently” by the drug folks and their connections within prisons.

How utterly sad… all of it is immensely sad.

Though it is a new way for me to look at the world, I can see very easily how this very much is the work of the devil. (Yes, that still sounds weird to me, but I believe it nonetheless.)

Dear God, please, help us to heal the broken people. Help the most broken ones to return to you and your guidance. Help us all to repent and to turn fully to you and your will, at all levels and in all places and at all times. We are all in such need of you – help us to hear your call and to respond lovingly to it and with the immediately due haste. Help us, please, to love and to be filled with your love. Help us to embrace your love such that we can always and powerfully reject the devil and his ways. Help us to start to heal your people and this beautiful world you created and in which we still are blessed to live. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2023

Thank you, officers

After lots and lots of searching and calling and waiting, a station officer told me that I actually just needed to call 9-1-1, and tell them it was not an emergency, so they could clock it as a non-emergency and actually get me the help I needed… at the then-1:15 in the morning.

And so, I did. It was bizarre. After waiting another very long time, however, I sorted out something slightly sketchy to solve the problem, and called them back to cancel. I explained what I had had, the woman apologized at my having had to do that, and said she understood why I was wanting to cancel the officer, and said that she would cancel it.

Not even a minute and a half later, the police vehicle showed up in front of the house.

So, I went on out and talked to the two officers. They were extremely sweet, understood why I wanted to cancel, and gave me a much better option that left me feeling, I believe, joyful and extremely grateful, of course.

But wow… how often do I stay out late in the first place? And the one time I do in a long time, it ends up being past midnight, and I end up on the phone with 9-1-1 and talking with several police officers… haha

But I am safe and well. Remember that.

Post-a-day 2021

Unprepared

I don’t really want to write about this right now, but here we are and here I write.

I am taking care of myself like a mother to myself, because my mom is on the other side of town, likely long asleep for the night, and I am up here, house-sitting on my own. Even the dog is wiped out asleep.

But I am sitting on this bed, preparing to go to sleep – for as long as my menstruating will allow at once, or course – with eyes burning from the tears shed during my shower… my throat just a little sore from the sobs released… my brain struggling to see straight with this potential upturn of its outlook world. I have myself a glass of ice water, and it has already helped with my burning eyes and shaky throat and hands, soothing everything like a balm…

You see, I watched the film Remember Me tonight, the one with Robert Pattinson wearing the same bracelet watch he wore in Twilight. I didn’t know anything about it but that it had him in it, it was some sort of romance, and, due to the title, this romance clearly was going to end before the film did. Usually, it is death of some sort, but this film was giving vibes that it potentially could be just that death brought them together and they helped each other heal and move on in life, though now without one another.

…. Yeah…

(*****Spoilers coming up here, so stop reading the post, if you want to watch the film without a super major spoiler.*****)

Okay, so, the moment they showed the date on the board, I was stressed. I was already stressed-annoyed at the film in various ways at this point, how there just wasn’t enough of anything. But, at the date, I was beginning really to stress. I was extremely grateful there was no footage or re-enactment or anything of the sort of the buildings or the smoke-dust-rubble clouds. There is that. However, I was actually angry at the turn of events. At the obvious phone call. At how it no longer felt like a poorly done feature film I had just been watching, but like a small glimpse into what could have been someone real’s real life. And that that was how it actually might have gone for someone real.

And it just felt so real, I couldn’t let myself face anything other than anger at such an ending being sprung upon me like that – how dare they? This was supposed to be a film, not a sop story about our misery that day… and forward…

I was only a kid at the time. I didn’t remember that it was a Tuesday, but I remember that we were coming back to our classroom from gym class, and Kristen and Trish-Anne and I stopped to look at the television that was on in the ESL classroom – the televisions were almost never on, except for a rare film. But it wasn’t a movie.

What is it?? we all wondered and asked each other and no one in particular. Kristen had seen the longest view of the television. “Someone bombed the twin towers,” she said as she turned back to me. I quickly reviewed what I had glimpsed on the television: tall buildings, smoke and fire somewhere in the middle near the top. Her words make sense in such a way that they do not. She was wearing overalls that day. With her words, I didn’t understand how to feel, nor how I felt anyway. But I knew none of it was good.

Our teacher sat us down and explained what had happened. So far.

The buildings still stood at that point in time. That’s why it had looked just like a bomb had gone off. Not what had really happened.

I only remember near the end of the school day onward, now. There is nothing after the beginning of our teacher telling us what had happened. I don’t remember if we had the live news coverage on or not, but I know I saw it somehow… it is brandished in my brain, so I know I saw it eventually.

(**** Another warning: Graphic references coming, so be careful.*****)

While it was difficult to see such beauty disappear so suddenly, like a game of Godzilla at home with our massive cardboard building bricks, although more effectively, as they even went to ash instead of merely falling down everywhere, what probably hit me the most was – and this is difficult for me even to write right now – the people…. It was seeing those people, desperate in their last hope for physical salvation, jumping, as the building shrank toward gravity’s command. That and knowing how so many people had been able to phone their families and friends to share their verbal love one final time while living on this planet… knowing one’s impending doom, and having to say goodbye while still so seemingly whole and safe and well.

……

We have a few major incidents in our lives, ones that give us a kind of foundation to our ways of being going forward. Something happens, and it is mentally significant for us – we are usually extremely disturbed by it – such that we decide then and there that we never want to have to feel that way again, and so determine never to be such-and-such again. Therefore, to avoid such-and-such, we will do this or be this going forward. I have never been able to figure mine out. Not ones that really stand out above the rest. Not ones that show me the source incident for my desperate need to be right, or, at least, to know, whatever it happens to be.

But, in my shower tonight, as I gave in to the rising emotions within myself, and allowed them to surface and release, I began to wonder if one of my incidents just might have been somehow around September eleventh. Around that footage of those people, falling…. falling… hopelessly falling. It wasn’t exactly anything that happened directly to me, but seeing that footage happened to me. For days and weeks, and possibly months and years afterward – actually, yes, years, because I still do it today, both in the original way and in other ways – I would have these visions and thoughts of how people could have survived, what they would have had to do to get out okay, to make everything okay again in so many ways…. to make it just buildings and lost architecture. I had so many plans, mentally tested to every degree. Not everyone would make it out, I knew, but I would. Even if I had been on the upper floors, I would have. Because, perhaps in that moment, I became a sort of MacGyver. I had to have a way out of there. I had to…

I even had one idea – and this is big for such a little kid, I think – that involved rappelling myself down after Spider-Manning it to some nearby buildings and careening down a makeshift zip line… possibly even making several back and forth between the two towers, having people work together to get more of us out of there, and fast.

But why did I have to do this brainstorming? I didn’t lose anyone directly in the event, so I had an odd connection to it all to be so strongly enveloped by this idea. For me, though, it made life suddenly real, the danger of it real. I had recently been in New York City. We had gone into those buildings. But it was raining that day, and hard, so the observation decks were closed. So, we didn’t go up all the way. But we could have. And we could have gone later.

Why did those people die? Why didn’t they find ways out, or ways out in time? My answer back then, whether I ever said it aloud or not, was, “They weren’t prepared.” And, so, I would be. This was my wake up call and the beginning of my own preparations.

Preparations for what, you ask? For life. I was saying today how I kind of have a rough ten backup plans for any specific thing. And, though I was slightly joking, I know that I could start listing and probably reach ten rather easily. And that’s for anything I do or intend to do. And, also, for things I have done. I have evaluated them, too, and determined how I could have done them better… in myriad ways.

What’s more, to this day I take any scary scenario I see in a film or show, or just hear about, and end up going through, in the side of my mind, the best ways to get out of it safely… even though it has nothing much to do with me and my life. I cannot face a scary scenario in anything without automatically doing it. I just have to figure out how to get out of it, get out of there, and survive, stay alive, be safe again.

Anyway, my stomach is hurting in an achy, sleep-needing type of way, so I’m going to close this out and get to sleep already. All of this has been just some brainstorming on my part. I have always held a weird space with this event, especially in that whole reliving the crashes and shrinkings of the buildings and how to get out of them safely and effectively… in my fear to accept that there might be nothing that can be done when it is truly one’s time… in my desperation to make sure I am ready to face whatever comes my way. There is a shaking terror within me at the idea of being unprepared, caught off-guard… a life-threatening terror. And seeing this in this new light has shaken me somewhat tonight (and also a lot quite physically).

We didn’t go up all the way that day. I had figured and intended to go back and go up another time, on a clear day. I would be like in the Godspell film.

Except, now, I never would be. And neither would anyone else be…

Instead of crying myself to sleep, though, I determined that I wanted to be held and taken care of and loved and accepted. So, I am doing that for myself, instead.

At that, goodnight. 🙂 ❤

Post-a-day 2020