This last week was a huge reminder that none of us are perfect. This article I found on Imgur really made me think about how much we all need each other, yet we continue to do things that separate us into us and them.
The Other Side Of The Coin by creepyginger
They’re not all heroes. Some are lousy. And when one turns bad and beats somebody, or takes money, or lies under oath, or frames the innocent, we blame them all.
When they give us a ticket and walk away, we give them the finger. If we’re arrested, it’s never our fault. It’s always their fault, because we’re all victims of something. We have our excuses. And they’re the cops.
But they’re the ones who pick up the dead infants, frozen in plastic bags left on the back of a wooden porch. They listen to a man explain why he stabbed his brother to death over a 98-cent cigarette lighter. They hear the reasons of the monsters who lure children on playgrounds.
They wade through the stupid brutality of crime, and clean up the human garbage and get dirty. We don’t want to really know how it’s done and what they do and the price. We wouldn’t like it. And they wouldn’t tell us anyway.
They look away when the political hacks play tough guy, wearing fancy guns and pretending they’re the police. They ignore it because they have careers too, and those are the rules.
Police know they’ll get hit with a brutality complaint if they push too hard. And they know what happens if they don’t push hard enough fast enough.
When they get shot to death on the streets, we give them a state funeral and media coverage. So they can’t trust anybody. Nobody but one of their own would understand. They gather at funerals, quiet and mournful, and then go off to drink with their kind. Despite the concerned community groups and the political law-and-order speeches and the outpouring of official sympathy when one of them is buried, they know one thing. They’re cops, and they’re alone.
