https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/an-ex-con-helps-save-a-stranger-an-ex-cop-allegedly-murders-one/

The following things happened within the space of about 72 hours:

*Maricopa, Arizona resident Henry Ricketts, who was released from prison two weeks ago, jumped head-first into a septic tank filled with raw sewage to rescue a two-year-old girl. Like millions of Americans, Ricketts was put into a government cage for violating drug “laws” – but he understood, and followed, the highest moral law, the Golden Rule, by responding instantly to a stranger’s desperate plea to rescue the drowning infant.

After the child fell into the tank Saturday morning (January 11), Ricketts spent several minutes trying to find the child, swallowing some of the feculent water in the attempt. Another bystander, Audencio Rios, jumped in and eventually located the child. After the apparently lifeless infant was retrieved from the pit, a woman named Chelsea Cunningham successfully administered CPR.

*Two days after this terrifying but ultimately inspiring incident in Arizona, an angry movie-goer in Wesley Chapel, Florida, pulled a gun and shot another man who had been using his cellphone to send text messages to his daughter. The alleged killer, Curtis Reeves, was a retired SWAT team commander – that is, somebody who had spent decades employed as a government-licensed dispenser of aggressive violence.

Significantly, this incident took place before a scheduled showing of “Lone Survivor,” Hollywood’s most recent specimen of truth-challenged Jingo propaganda.

*At about the same time Officer Reeves (ret.) was allegedly killing someone over a matter of etiquette, a jury of punitive populists in Orange County, California acquitted two former Fullerton police officers, Manuel Ramos and Ken Cincinelli, on all charges arising from the fatal gang-beating of Kelly Thomas, a mentally troubled homeless man, in July 2011. In rendering that decision the jury treated the victim’s resistance to criminal aggression by police as an offense meriting summary execution.

The heroic rescue on January 11 is a splendid illustration of spontaneous cooperation to protect and serve someone in profound danger; the verdict in Orange County is a museum-quality specimen of the authoritarian superstition that sustains the government’s “law enforcement” system; the atrocity in Florida lays bare the reflexive, murderous violence that is nurtured within the members of the State’s punitive caste.

It’s worth noting the contrast between ex-con Ricketts and ex-cop Reeves – the former risked his life to help save a stranger, the other saw nothing amiss in taking the life of a stranger because of a petty disagreement. This is one of myriad illustrations of the fact that a career in law enforcement cultivates contempt for the moral law, and an anti-social disposition. Reasonable people would be justified in believing that ex-cons are safer company than ex-cops.

2:25 am on January 14, 2014

The Best of William Norman Grigg