Seeing/Being

I don't know how I feel about the fact that I've become accustomed to seeing cops everywhere I go, every day.

Earlier today, at the Times Square station, I saw a young uniform pounce toward this tiny elfin woman, demanding "Let me -- what do you -- let me see that" and stopping about a foot from her, near the top of the staircase down to the tracks. By then, she had pulled her golden-orange Metrocard back out from her pocket.

A cardboard box with a plastic "I Heart NY" bag wrapped around it becomes an imitation bomb when it is sailed up a tree in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the boys in blue swarm, seeing fear and terror everywhere, being fear and terror everywhere. A woman on a bicycle at a bicycle event is arrested for wearing a cop costume--er, impersonating a police officer.

Have they taken leave of their minds in New York and the East Coast in general and Texas in general and the country in general? At the low end of this spectrum is the tasering of pregnant women, sidebarred by comments on stories about this, comments celebrating, comments false equivocating. What year is this, why why why must the mainstream overarching infatuation be with the 1950s not, say, the 1970s--or even the 1990s?

Sheesh, pass the beer.