This week’s Random Rumination comes from Harlan Ellison :

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From Harlan Ellison, responding to a discouraged police officer :

I know damned well there are (good) cops like you. I’ve met a few; and they always wind up like Serpico,brokenhearted or bust-headed. Because police these days aren’t like police when I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio in the Forties.

Friend of mine, a lieutenant of homicide, got a
trifle bombed one night, sitting around rapping with
me, and he let slip one of the most scary things
I’ve ever heard. He said :

“Harlan, it used to be,when a cop said ‘them or us’ he meant us were the good people, the cops and the decent citizens and the responsible business community, anybody on the side of Law and Order, the way it used to be in those Frank Capra films.

Them meant bank robbers, homicidal maniacs, rapists,
guys who torched their own stores for the insurance,
murderers, all the kooks.

Things’ve changed so much,these days when we say ‘them or us’ we mean anybody with a badge is us . . . all the rest of you are them.”

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He wrote this in 1975.

(yes, I know I blogged this here in 2014, but it bears repeating)

I may be late reading comments.

1. It’s my Birthday
2. I’m on my way to Terlingua / Big Bend National Park