BLINDED BY THE LIGHT: For years, I have enjoyed the luxury of seeing whatever I wanted to see. No matter the belief, there was always an abundance of supportive evidence. More recently, reality has intruded. Now I can see only what I have to see. Disciplined delusion. It’s cheaper than pharmaceuticals, and no supreme beings need apply. Once people bring God into the argument, as current events attest, heads start rolling and blood doesn’t stop flowing.
With that in mind, I found myself getting positively misty-eyed while watching last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. I pinched myself a couple of times, lest I be overwhelmed. Like Fox Mulder of X-Files fame, I want to believe. Be advised: There’s no one more dangerous than a hopeaholic looking for a fix.
Once again, the supervisors — all five of them — found themselves on all fours wrestling the greased pig of jail reform, figuring out how to respond to four Grand Jury reports. Each report demonstrated, yet again, that people were dying in County Jail because the people who work there — guards and the private Wellpath contractors paid to provide health services — were not adequately trained to deal with the exigencies of people on the edge of flipping out. In this case, I think there were four dead bodies in the past year. One more since the reports came out.