Trego's Mountain Ear

I’ve just watched a couple videos out of Minneapolis. A woman is dead in a confrontation with ICE agents. The old saying is that pictures don’t lie. Obviously, in this day of AI, that isn’t true. (Hell, Stalin’s airbrush specialists took the truth out of pictures before I was born) That’s not my point. The whole bloody thing was avoidable.

I feel safe from ICE, and even as an elderly stay-at-home living in Trego, I probably encounter ICE agents on the road more often than the average American. They’re kind of neighbors. I may not wave, but neither do I flip them off. It isn’t a job I ever considered, but there are a lot of jobs I didn’t consider. We’re courteous – usually friendly – to each other at Roosville.

I recall the mojados I met when I was in the southwest – basically decent people, caught in an economic bind, trying to make a living and send money home to their families. If they got caught by La Migra, so be it – it was just one of the risks of doing business. But then it was a game with only two sides playing.

In general, doing one stupid thing doesn’t get you killed. Doing several stupid things increases the odds of stupidity being fatal. Getting several stupid people doing stupid things at the same time increases the likelihood of someone getting hurt or killed. Perhaps Heinlein described it best: “Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

Max Weber defined government: “A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” Combine that with people doing stupid things, getting killed becomes too likely. Minneapolis isn’t in the southwest I knew 40 years ago. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.