The Guv'mint Just Wants To Help You!

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemas?

Saw this story being circulated on a few blogs.

In a nutshell, kid gets a bump on the head, Dad thinks he's OK. Neighbor calls paramedics, they barge into the house uninvited, find kid medically OK. When Dad declines to take kid to ER on the woo-woo's recommendation, one of 'em gets a bug up his ass and starts calling Johnny Law and CPS.

Eventually, someone gets fed up with Dad's failure to comply (even though there's apparently no law requiring him to...) and the SWAT team makes their usual dynamic entry a day later, terrifies the family as they seize the kid and take him to the hospital. Where, of course, the doctors find nothing wrong.

It goes without saying that I'm completely appalled, but not very surprised. It seems that when a municipality issues SWAT gear to its law enforcement personnel, they also remove an ice cream scoop's worth of grey matter from the Rational Decision Making section of the brain of every one connected with the unit.

One of our biggest failings as human beings is the inability to let a conflict go. We hold grudges like nobody's business. Add to that the hubris and arrogance of a guvmint employee, and the institutional tendency of those in law enforcement to utterly crush under a jackboot anyone committing the slightest degree of "contempt of cop", and you've got a recipe for overreaction and abuse of civil rights.

I'm sure a mess o' lawsuits will result from this debacle, and if there's any justice left in this fair land, everyone of the guvmint employees that perpetrated this outrage will be able to heat their homes this winter from the rosy-red glow emanating from their tort-reamed bungholes.