Dignifying Death

Today, a full week after an officer's end of watch following a deadly accident while involved in a high-speed chase, his remains will be put to rest at a nearby national cemetery with all the pomp and circumstance of a high-profile funeral. A decorated military veteran, as well as local law enforcement officer, his grisly death in a squad car that exploded into flames on a local thoroughfare has sobered the community. The car the officer was chasing also went front first into a palm tree and exploded into flames, with both occupants critically injured, but surviving as I write this. They have been charged and are being held under arrest in their hospital beds; one of the two has an extensive history of criminal activity, including previous auto theft and evading arrest.

The two women who died the night previous to the officer in a community to the east of his traffic accident have also been laid to rest. One of the two is the mother of 9 (yes, nine) children,and while the other female fatality has been named, no details have been provided about her in the local media. The other two adults critically injured in the accident survive in hospital. Three juveniles and an adult male were arrested for causing this accident, allegedly following an argument that ended in a high-speed chase of a van filled with family members trying to flee their pursuers, who were firing guns from their car at the van. The list of prior criminal charges against all four of these men is long, but begins with "known gang affiliation."

Yesterday, a school-owned van left an east end school for the drive to Ontario Airport, transporting a group of high school seniors to a scheduled flight to tour California colleges. When a tire blew not far from the point of origin, the van rolled several times, ejecting a 17-year-old female passenger onto the freeway. Two other adults in the van suffered critical injuries, while the final two occupants escaped with moderate injuries. Allegedly, the tires on the school district van were bald, but there was no money available to replace the tires due to the on-going budget battles in Sacramento that target schools first, rather than the plethora of revenue-sucking, special interest programs (pork).

What is the price of a human life? Is one life more valuable than another? Is the price the police officer paid, for his widow, his son, his extended family/friends, his community, higher than the price paid by the woman with 9 children? Or by the 17-year-old high school senior who may survive to attend college, but will live with the results of a state's budgetary decisions? These tragedies point directly to the problems any state has in allocating revenue: career criminals clog a prison system; legacy gang members enforce an outdated code of machismo and murder; and public agencies are unable to ensure the safety of employees who are stretched thin to keep the doors open and the public served.

Yes, we assume to provide too much for too many with too little thought to who's going to pay for all this, but when we put an agency on-line to deliver services, we owe it to the agency to fully staff it, equip it, and maintain it. If we cannot keep the promise on which the agency opens its doors, then we need to close it, not allow it to continue to operate at half-staff, half-equipped, and somewhat maintained. We have bogged down our prison system with career criminals, which means we let lesser offenders plea bargain their way onto the streets because it's more cost-effective than incarceration. We fail to drop the hammer on career gang members because it gives the appearance of racism when so many Mexican residents, both legal and illegal, are arrested, but the facts are the facts, and the allegations of perceived racism are media constraints that allow criminal activity to flourish. While we debate firing 1/3 of the employees in a school district because we cannot keep the doors open without a tax increase, we put the remaining employees in jeopardy with oversized classes, fewer security personnel, and sporadic maintenance of the equipment and facilities.

Far too many people lost their lives in the Valley last week in very public venues. If there is a lesson to be learned from this carnage, let it be taught, let it be reinforced. Let it become the learning outcome of a sad lesson in what happens when society steps to the side of what it must do to keep alive the American Dream, and, instead, creates the American Nightmare. We cannot go back and we must go on, but if we do not create plans that are realistic to who we are now, rather than who we were in another decade, we are going to collapse under our own delusions of grandeur. Change is one of the hardest tasks for any of us, but as the proverb says, the journey of a lifetime begins with but a single step: one step becomes two, becomes four, becomes a thousand times a thousand.

To be successful, however, we must take the first step, not stand in place and wish things were different -- all the while wanting everything to stay the same and being unwilling to change anything.