Protect

I can't see at night, so when I'm driving, I basically rely on memory.  I stick my chin out over the top of the steering wheel and squint, because everyone knows that when you can't see anything, shutting your eyes even tighter is super helpful. But I live in a relatively small town and don't get out much, so if you're walking at night in my town when I happen to be driving, not to worry, as long as you're wearing a florescent orange space shuttle suit and a fully equipped miner's helmet.

But while I was tooling along at a reckless possible 20 mph tonight, there he was. A crafty, highly trained crime fighting machine; a small town Officer Of The Law, hidden away in a cemetery, cruiser lights off, just far enough away from the road so that no one could possibly see him. Except ME. Or Helen Keller. Or any satellite that can detect a terrorist training camp in North Africa. 

Now, no one is going to accuse small town Officers Of the Law of being intellectuals, but I'm curious about what this hiding in the cemetery shit was about. First, was this some attempt at camouflage, like anyone would think a cop car with beaming neon YOUR TOWN POLICE DEPARTMENT letters plastered all over it parked in a cemetery without its lights on was a tombstone?

But I'm happy they're here. I'm safe, because my town's cops have a Zero Tolerance Policy for black people and teenagers. I watched them in action once, "pretending" they were getting coffee at the local convenience store while their eyes were totally fixed on the black couple (I think there might be three in our town) acting shady, picking out what kind of cereal they were going to buy while they were clearly being black. But the black people weren't going to pull  anything over on OUR boys, and I hung around long enough to watch the couple actually PURCHASE their cereal. Whew! Crime thwarted!

And as for teenagers, well, don't even THINK about being a teenager around here. Because that's illegal too. Our cops are fully armed with tazers, night sticks, bullet proof vests, drug sniffing dogs, semi-automatic weapons and way cool badges to make sure that there are no teenagers anywhere. But since they aren't superhuman and can't actually taze all teenagers out of existence, they make sure the rest of us semi blind while driving at night citizens are protected from the under 18 crowd.  Because they might gather together, become "Gangs," then "Do Drugs" and "Bully" people.

So our small town Officer's Of The Law are brave soldiers who can actually fight crimes before they actually happen. And at the end of a busy weekend night, they will have a teenager in custody for possession of a full bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade