I was walking through San Francisco’s Mission District the other night at the tail-end of an all-day City wanderlust when I inadvertently snagged this little bit of walk-by conversational snippet, one young man asking another on the sidewalk, “Are you going to the anti-police rally?”
The “anti-police rally.”
The phrase immediately struck me at the time as being rather odd and discomforting. Why would anyone be “anti-police?” If you’re “anti-police,” does it mean you’d prefer the police would just go away so we could all go back to some self-regulating state of nature, with no police at all?
Of course I understood the context out of which this phrase and whatever rally was to take place was drawn. Police have been on the hot seat over the past couple of years in this country, most intensively over the past several months as a number of innocent and unarmed African Americans have been killed under suspicious circumstances by our armed men in blue...
Read More
Recent Comments