Ofc. L.R.

When I was just twelve months old, I saw the glass as half full. Then, from two years of age till about forty-two, I saw the glass as half empty. — At present, I’m clear-sighted enough to say that we need to smash the glass.

“Take away this cup from me.”
     —Jesus Christ (Mark 14:36)

I think the human world is beyond evil. We need a word much stronger than “evil” to describe the human world. But the sad thing about this is that although I’m careful, when saying what I just said, to add the adjective “human” to the word “world”, hoping thereby to signify that I do not think that the awful ugliness that I see in humankind’s ordering of the world as inherent in the world itself — to me, the world itself is sheer potential: possibility — I say, the sad thing is that MOST humans are totally compassionate beings. It’s only a fraction of a percentage of them that ruin it for every living thing.

How nice it would be, if you could trust the rider who arrives in your camp on horseback in the morning and delivers you a message. 

One thing I cannot stand is being ambushed by enemies. I strongly dislike the feeling of a bullet grazing my leg so that much meat gets torn from my calf. I worked hard to acquire that muscle, yet it gets shot off in an instant. That does not seem fair. (I know: Life isn’t fair. But I assumed it would make an exception in my case.) And when a bullet that is meant for me hits the man walking beside me, who happens to be my supervisor — this too is discomfiting. My supervisor’s first instinct is to assume that the bullet lodged into his heart, but it has only hit his hand. That’s because he was holding his hand over his heart while making an earnest point about his love for “this great nation” when his own men killed him.

If you live in the United States during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and you’re roughly middle-aged, then you know about two events: the devastation of the World Trade Centers, and the COVID-19 pandemic. After the former, the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law; and, after the latter, the CARES Act was signed into law. (FYI, the first acronym stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”; and the second stands for “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security”.) I myself have read thru neither of these two bills, but I’m told that the USA PATRIOT Act is more than 300 pages long, and the CARES Act is more than 800 pages long. Now here’s the simple thought that I have about this pair of book-length bills that passed shortly after the above two tragedies: 

Imagine living in the time PRIOR TO each of these country-shattering disasters: How would you choose to spend your energies? — Can you see yourself paying a squadron of lawyers to compose a tome, just in case something terrible happens, so that your ideas can become law? I wonder who is commissioning the next big bundle of…

§

Darn, that’s all the time I allotted myself to whine — now I must put on my blue uniform, kiss my wife and kids goodbye, and go serve and protect.

§

“Officer Bryan Ray, my dear partner, welcome to our squad car. Have you eaten breakfast yet?” sez Officer Leah Rachael, as she pulls up alongside me in our patrol cruiser.

“Yes, I have, but I could go for another,” I say, climbing into the vehicle. “Plus I still need to smoke my cigar.”

So Officer Leah Rachael pilots us to our favorite diner and we order waffles topped with cherry syrup and whipped cream. Then we both smoke cigars and chat about life.

“How’ve you been?” I ask while lighting up.

“Good, good. Yourself?” replies Officer Leah Rachael while lighting up.

Then we get our first distress call: Right while we are in the middle of discussing how fine the waffles tasted, my pager starts to beep and vibrate.

“Shoot. This one’s a nine-eleven,” I say, eyeing the screen; “we need to answer this call.”

“Alright, let’s go,” smiles Officer Leah Rachael, while mashing her cigar in the ashtray.

We arrive on the scene (after I called the number back and jotted down the directions in my pocket-sized notebook) and hold out our pistols.

“Freeze, punks!” sez Officer Leah Rachael. And then we handcuff everybody.

So that’s how our first drug-bust went down. There were two rival gangs trying to make an exchange of contraband items, and we caught them in the act, thanks to an anonymous tip from a concerned citizen. But the heartwarming thing about this event is that it ended up pleasant for all who were involved; because the gang members got their day in court, and the judge took pity upon them: she let them go scot-free. Now they all work as archivists in a place that preserves the gems of silent cinema.

“I love when folks whose lives were on the wrong track get their lives put back onto the right track,” I remark to my partner Leah Rachael.

“Yes, for we’re all born on the proper trajectory, but then, somewhere along the line, our train goes astray, and we appreciate when compassionate bystanders help to set our engine aright,” replies Officer Leah Rachael. “When charity works, the result is beautiful.”

“Well said,” I say. “Should we take a hotline call now?”

“Sure,” she replies while adjusting something about the pants of her outfit.

“Hello,” I declare into the handset, very professionally, “you’ve reached the patrol cruiser of Officers Bryan Ray and Leah Rachael from the Eagan Police Department. How many I direct your call?”

“Um, do I need to know the name of a specific sector of law enforcement, so that you can transfer me to the apropos detective?” sez the voice; “or can I just explain what is wrong and expect that you will be able to solve my conundrum?”

“I’m sorry,” I reply; “the way that I greeted you was a bit confusing — by asking ‘How may I direct your call,’ all I meant is that I wish to serve and protect you — I didn’t mean to imply that I understand how to reroute our landline so as to connect you with a higher-up in our pecking order: I’m not a professional telephone operator. But, if you need detective work, we can do that: my partner and I are both certified detectives. I’ve even written a book on the subject.”

The voice on the line seems impressed by our credentials: “You’re true-blue sleuths?”

“Yes, affirmative!” I cry.

“OK, here’s my problem,” sez the distinctly female voice: “I’m a young marine, and I’m trapped in the past — I’m currently in the Philippines, during the turn of the twentieth century, and my troops are being shot at by foreign aliens who have surrounded us.”

“What are you doing so far from your hometown? Don’t you think your parents might be worried about you?” I say, genuinely concerned with the safety of my subject.

“No! Listen,” sez the sweet feminine voice on the line, “the problem is NOT that I’m so far away from my loved ones — I’m NOT homesick: I dispelled those rumors in my upcoming autobiography — the reason I’m calling your police hotline is that our backup, our reinforcements, by which I mean the battleship that followed us discretely up the river that runs parallel to our land-path, is supposed to be firing its weapons upon our enemies to provide us lethal aid in this catastrophe; however, instead of helping us out, the ship is helping out our enemies! For the gunmen on the warship — OUR warship — apparently cannot distinguish between ourselves and the foreigners (they got our rival groups mixed up — perhaps all combatants, at a distance, appear identical) and they’re firing missiles at US instead of THEM!! Oh, it’s awful. Please come quick.”

So Officer Leah Rachael and I speed to the Philippines in our squad car, with our lights flashing and our siren on extra loud, and we climb out of our windows and begin to hack our way through the ferns with our machetes, until we reach the place where the troops of the U.S. are being attacked by both friends and foes. We then engage in topnotch sleuthwork and eventually figure out how to explain to the battleship that keeps shelling its own fellow soldiers to leave off doing that: “Switch over to killing only civilians instead,” we shout.

“Thanks so much,” sez our female caller, after we help her and her fellow Marines win the war. And she hugs my partner Officer Leah Rachel; then she hugs me. “You really saved my hide,” she adds.

§

“Whew!” I exclaim as my partner Leah Rachael and I are driving away from the bloody battle in the Philippines; “I’m glad that most of our distress calls are just domestic disturbances in the city of an English-speaking nation. The type of work that we did today is grueling and traumatizing.”

“I, too, prefer helping human beings rather than harming human beings,” replies Officer Leah Rachael; “even if the human beings are foreigners.”

I look at my watch and realize that we have time to take one more call before the clock strikes eleven. (Eleven o’clock is when I smoke my next cigar.) “Shall we see what the citizens band radio has to say?” I ask.

“Sure,” sez my cop-partner cheerfully.

So, after pressing the “TRANSMIT” button on the citizens band radio’s handset, “What’s up?” I yell.

“Ah, hold on for just a sec while I fetch the list… OK, here it is: We got a mom who can’t find her child at the Mall of America. We got a dog that won’t stop barking. And we got a houseplant that desperately needs water — it was abandoned by a snowbird,” sez the crackly voice on the radio. “Which dilemma do you want?”

I look at my partner Leah Rachael and she meets my gaze and nods confidently and winks. So I press the “TRANSMIT” button again and answer:

“We’ll take all three.”

“All three!? are you serious?” crackles the dispatcher.

“As serious as a grizzly bear in a beauty shop,” I reply.

So Officer Leah Rachael and I dash to the Mega Mall and locate the mother of the lost child. We ask her to give details about her boy’s appearance, so that we know what we’re looking for. She then describes her kid’s chubby face, and I make a sketch of him from this description. We bring my hand-drawn picture around to all the stores in the mall and show it to everyone who is willing to talk with us. Ultimately one of the shoppers recognizes the lad. She points to her right (this patron is a teenage female who happens to be playing a video game at the arcade known as Aladdin's Castle while we question her) and, sure enough, my partner and I spot the boy about three meters away from us — he is being kidnapped by the pastor of a church! — So we jail the pastor and return the lad to his biological mother, who thanks us profusely. 

Next, Officer Leah Rachael and I walk on foot to the above-mentioned residence where a dog has been reported as barking loudly for several hours straight. I approach the creature with my arm extended and my hand holding a piece of freshly killed venison. (I shot a deer on our way over, with a crossbow.) The hound accepts my offering gratefully and stops yapping. Officer Leah Rachael pets the canine’s head while he chews.

Finally, we found a way inside the snowbird’s abode and watered her neglected houseplant. That was our last job of the day. 

Now my partner Leah Rachael and I climb back into our patrol cruiser and catch the latest superhero movie and produce twelve children together.