EPTTake us there and in a 1000 words minimum piece give us your angriest, most explosive RANT.
When you get stuck, try writing “it’s hard NOT to get enraged when…”
Throw in some vices – greed, hypocrisy, pretension for good measure]
I got that assignment in my email over the weekend for a writing class dealing with satire/comedy and ended up having a lot of fun doing it. I cleaned it up a bit and thought I'd post it here. This is really long, just as a warning.
"The assignment appears to essentially ask what entity out there makes me angry that I have no real power against. The examples listed are, "institution, office, store, government agency, or school". These are all powerful in the sense that no matter how they have wronged us, there is really nothing we can do about it; no matter how annoying they may be, they are unavoidable. This is so even in the case of the store or school. If the store is somehow so terrible that we simply cannot stand it, then we can what, choose to no longer purchase things there? But if that turns out to be the case, then our largely individual stand against it, while being grand in principle, is largely ineffectual. The store will remain, and it will remain mockingly, in a sense. After all, we will be the ones inconvenienced in having to find a second store that can provide the same products or services we required from the first. The school will remain similarly. However, the institutions and government agencies are different because no matter how bad they are, and no matter how annoying and unfair and unjust and infuriating they can get to be, as long as we choose to remain citizens of the United States, we are left no choice but to survive them; the decision to move out of a country is much bigger than to choose a different school or store.
I'm still too young to rant and rave intelligently about the injustices and convolutions of government entities like the IRS, and complaining about the DMV has become so boring as to be cliché. However, I do have many interesting experiences with the organization that exists to protect the citizenry from itself that are both infuriating and that I would like to share. Yes, I speak of the police. This borders with the cliché as well, but I hope to at least elicit some sympathy and laughs.
The summer after my high school graduation, I found myself with a bored group of friends. We were of the kind too lacking in ambition to plan one of those grand euro-trips or something of the sort, yet still too discontent to be content simply taking advantage of the complete freedom we had in that null space between high school and college. We tried to be cool and went to parties whenever we heard about them, loitered out and about until the wee hours of the morning, and slowly inched deeper and deeper into the zone of delinquency. We all took to drinking and meeting people (in the absolute most superficial sense of the phrase), some experimented with drugs, but what is most important is that we grew more and more increasingly stupid as a symptom of our boredom.
The police are perpetually the arch nemesis of the high school teenager. They are a societal extension of the parents and the control they represent. Turning eighteen had granted a modicum of freedom upon us, sure, but the moment we walk out the door, there are a whole new set of rules and limitations that must be abided by, and with consequences much worse than being grounded or no dinner upon failing to do so. We learned this quickly. The parties we attended were more often than not broken up by the enforcers of the aforementioned rules and limitations, and we always found ourselves playing Mission Impossible to sneak along past the gauntlets of checkpoints and sobriety tests.
Getting alcohol was easy. You go to a party, or you ask your friend's chill older sister to buy you some. The problem was always drinking it. Parties are broken up, parks are patrolled, houses have parents, and on the street or in the car is just plain stupid.
While I never dipped into this myself, hanging out with my friends during their marijuana smoking phase was never really fun for me either. This can be easily imagined; bear with me for a moment. I am out with my friends. The objective of this is to do something together and have a good time, whatever that may entail. However, instead of doing something fun, the night turns into a law dodging night of nearly noir-esque proportions. It starts with the stoners seeking out a "slinger" (a dealer; someone who "slings" the goods. Somehow, they're not known as slangers, as far as I know), then coming up with a convoluted and overly complicated plan in order to meet up with them in some discreet yet not-too-discreet place in order to "pick up". Then whereupon picking up, the money is exchanged for the goods, and off we go dodging known police patrol routes and trying to search out places ever more remote to those damn cops. It was nothing but stress for me. I hated it. After all, they at least got to be high while doing it. I was stuck squeezed in a car full of giddy giggling stoners while they made a big deal out of every little thing in their inebriated stupor.
I digress. The entire summer with friends went by slowly, or quickly, depending on your perspective, in this fashion. We had never really dealt with the cops before. We had never hosted a party, and we had never been more than pulled over on suspicion. We were fortunate enough to be clean at all those critical times. However, this was all due to catch up with us, be it by karma's, Jesus's or some new age cosmic energy's power. And it did, and with an impact unexpected.
What really makes me angry is just how two-faced the police can be. They are mean, sure, but they're dealing with people who break and bend the laws they are paid to protect. However, if you're on the flip side of the law, being a victim of a perpetrator, they are suddenly nicer than parents about to tell their child s/he has cancer. This is a slight digression, but I decided to quickly throw it in before I go off telling stories, since it's my main contention with the police and is sort of the focus of this piece.
The culmination of my "adventures of the night", so to speak, with my friends that summer happened on a night where the lack of obligation and responsibility that summer had siphoned enough brain cells so our collective IQ was no longer triple digit. We were exceedingly bored. There were no parties, no new movies to watch, absolutely nothing to do. Those of us who wanted to drink had alcohol. Those of us who wanted to smoke had weed. Those of us who wanted to do both were one step short of paradise. However, the problem that had plagued us the entire summer plagued us that night as well. We had no place to indulge in those vices so close and ready at hand, yet so very far away.
While pondering upon this dilemma, the desperation came to a boiling point. One piped up and suggested the golf course! The golf course, of course, was a private golf course located next to a five star resetaurant. It was a stroke of absolute genius... Being fenced and closed off, it was about as discrete and quiet as you could possibly get. We immediately jumped on it and sped off. We left our cars in the parking lot of that incredibly nice restaurant, jumped that seven foot fence that was just asking to be jumped, and merrily skipped down into the heart of that golf course with vices in hand and expressions of victory on our faces and sentiments of it in our hearts. For the next couple hours we cheerily drank together. The stoners became more and more stupid, the drunkards became louder and more merry. It was a fun night full of conversations both deep and shallow, high fives, laughs, gaiety short-lived and lingering anxiety towards the rapidly approaching end of summer.
After a while, we had decided we'd had enough and lumbered back towards our cars, arms around each other, leftovers in hand. As we hopped back over the fence, those in front began loading the cars back up, while those of us further to the rear helped those who were more stupid drunk than simply inebriated. As I helped a giggly girl sit back down into a car, I saw something bright out of the corner of my eye. It took but a split second to know what it was. It was a flashing red, white and blue. It could only be one thing, with the fourth of July having been so far past. I could only mutter an, "oh shi-" before we were completely surrounded by no less than four police units, completely blinded by the long arm of the great red white and blue.
The next thing I knew, the girls were crying, the stoners were in a daze, and the dozen of us were sitting on a curb being yelled at by six police officers who had apparently been very, very bored. The one person above the age 21 had stocked his vehicle with alcohol for a party he was supplying that weekend. Our leftovers were quite substantial as well. There were several cases of beer, several handles of hard liquor, several bottles of wine; there were severals of every damn thing. The cops were yelling at us. What about, I cannot remember clearly today, but I'm sure it was your run of the mill reprimand, rubbing in our faces that we'd been caught and how stupid we were to have done what we did. I agreed with them wholeheartedly, so I suppose it must have been a pride issue that kept them going.
In any case, things were not looking good. There was not a single one of us that had not taken at least one sip of an alcoholic beverage, and with all but one being under 21 (that fellow was completely wasted, by the way), it could only be divine intervention that they had not waited until after we had started driving. There was a veritable mountain of alcohol and liquor in the middle of the parking lot, five cars being eyeballed by the cops, and now not four, but five police units parked around us. You would have thought we had tried to kill somebody, not ourselves. They were taking IDs, asking questions and making frightening threats.
Then the best possible thing happened. One of the cops looking through our cars (they cannot search without your express verbal permission or a warrant) found a Ziploc bag full of something in a backseat. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what it was, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you how far my heart sank, nor how hard I connected the palm of my hand to my face at that moment. Waving it around like a prize, the cops began harassing us with renewed vigor. They shouted for us sit straight on the curb with our hands on our knees. They shouted, "Whose is this! We found it in one of your cars! It must be one of yours! Who's the dumbass who's gonna 'fess up!" Yes, they shouted those declaratively, not questioningly. Perhaps that only added to my good friend's confusion, who was one of those that was what we call "cross-faded" by that point: he was both drunk and high. He seemed to be no less than utterly confused, and could no longer sit up straight. I was trying to help him up, but it was too late. One of the cops, in particular a stout looking man with spiked hair and a very American face and expression, approached and just stared at my friend. With a smug expression, he bent over and looked him over for a moment, then turned around and shouted in a voice loud enough for all to hear, "I think I found 'im!"
The man waving around the bag approached and said, "Is this yours?"
To which my dazed friend answered eloquently, " What? Naw, that ain't mines, what are you talking about?"
"You are completely wasted, son, what the hell are you trying to pull?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, sir," he replied in an inarguably slurred voice.
Laughing to himself, the officer turned around to his colleagues, all laughing as well, and said, "Can you believe this idiot?" before turning back around, bringing his faces merely inches from my friend's and saying, "Sit up straight, listen to what I'm saying and LOOK at me when you're talking to me!"
My friend, completely out of his mind at this very moment, then said one of those things that he will be known for for the rest of his life. This is one of those lines they put into the trailers of comedy films, one of those lines script writers come up with for larger-than-life dunce characters for moves that squeeze laughs out of stupidity.
He replied, "Ossifer, I can't understand what you're saying. Could you please back off?"
My heart sank to new depths, and my head was in my hands between my knees.
Laughing even harder now, the officer stood up my friend, and put him through the motions: face away, stand straight, hands on the head, cuffs on one wrist before bring it down behind him, then cuffs on the other. My jaw dropped as I stared in disbelief at what had just happened to my friend. These cops were absolutely unbelievable. A group of stupid and rowdy teenagers were sitting scared on a curb at three in the morning, and they were laughing. It was unbelievable. I was swearing to myself in three different languages at that point, while holding a crying girl friend's hand and calming another guy down who was on the verge of freaking out.
They continued waving around the weed in our faces after that on the basis that it couldn't have possibly been just one of us that had been smoking it. The rest of the stoners had been scared solid, not moving or saying anything. They then approached me and spied upon my face. I am a 5'6" Asian with a horrible inherited alcoholic tolerance even now, much less so when I was merely eighteen and still new to it. My face was flushed after having had a few drinks, and my eyes were red. We call it the "Asian glow", going along with the stereotype of Asians having bad alcohol tolerances. Red eyes are also, by some cosmic joke, a tell tale side effect of smoking marijuana. Next thing I know, I was being shouted at and coerced into claiming the weed as my own by an extremely overweight and intimidating police officer. Trying to stay as calm as I could in such a situation, I repeatedly denied their accusations. They called out my red face and eyes, I stupidly said, "I've got the Asian glow. I already said I've had a few drinks."
The conversation then took a turn towards the absurd. The officer had obviously never heard of such an expression and with a skeptical face, turned around to his cronies and exclaimed, "What the hell is 'Asian glow'? Have you ever heard of that?"
While laughing, the other officers shook their heads.
They then turned to another person in our group, a Sri Lankan, whose eyes are to this day perpetually red due to disagreements between his very eyeballs and his contact lenses.
"Hey, you said you're from Sri Lanka, right? Your eyes are red, do you got Sri Lankan glow?" in a mocking manner. Fortunately, it seemed they'd had their fun at that point, and after making one arrest, seemed content with just forcing someone to stamp out the weed in the mud.
Things sort of lulled after that. The one above the age of 21 was being written a ticket, and they were calling us up one by one to the cars, asking a few questions and entering our names and information into their computers. I sat back back down after being called up to where I had been before, a sniffling girl on one side, and a noticeably empty space on the other where my friend had been before being carted off to the police station. The girl to my one side had been shivering for several minutes now, nervous. I had been trying to calm her down, but after what had just happened, even I was getting nervous. One of the quieter police officers then approached, seeing her shivering.
He said calmly and quite nicely, "Hey, why are you shivering, you ok?"
She replied, "Oh, no, I'm just kind of cold."
He looked around quickly, then upon seeing a jacket on top of one of our cars, asked aloud, "Whose jacket is that?"
My Sri Lankan friend, a relatively responsible kind of person who had been fairly calm and collected along with me the entire night, spoke up and said, "That's mine, sir."
"Do you mind if she wears it?" asked the nice police officer.
"I don't mind at all, of course," he replied. The police officer motioned for another officer standing nearby the car to bring the jacket over.
That officer grabbed it and began walking over to the girl sitting next to me. Mid way, however, he stopped, and with a sly look, asked, "You wouldn't have anything suspicious in this jacket by any chance, would you?"
Taken aback, my friend answered, "No, I really don't."
"So you wouldn't mind if I searched it really quick?" asked the officer.
"Go right ahead," my friend replied, almost in a challenging manner.
The officer shuffled through the jacket's pockets, finding receipts, gum wrappers, then a small crimson red thing slightly larger than a credit card. He looked at it curiously and asked, "What is this?"
"It's a Coleman camping kit thing. My dad gave it to me a couple years ago. It has a mirror on one side I use."
Playing with it some more, the officer pulled out a pair of tweezers and a small blade about an inch and a half in length from it. His eyes widened a bit and his demeanor switched back into an authoritative one. It was at this point that the proverbial shit had really hit the fan.
"This is a blade," said the police officer.
"Yeah, it's a little camping kit, like I said," replied my friend.
"Do you realize that in the state of California, carrying around a concealed weapon is considered a felony?" said the police officer in an almost smug and victorious manner.
My mind went blank. This was utterly unbelievable. The girl next to me went still and squeezed my hand until it hurt. I felt numb. Everything until this point had felt comical, to an extent. It had been just stupid and ridiculous. However, this was absurd to a tragic degree.
"W-What? I-I wasn't aware that that was a concealed weapon, sir," my friend replied politely, mustering as much conviction as he could.
The officer appeared to ponder this for a second, then passed around the Coleman camping kit to the other officers. They spoke to themselves for a few seconds, before I saw a sort of unilateral nodding of heads. Then came the hammer.
"Stand up, please," said the first officer.
"Wait, are you kidding me? You're serious?" said my friend.
Things began picking up again. I was in utter disbelief.
The officer stood him up, then had his hands behind his head and was cuffing him. The only difference between this and the arrest of my other friend was that this time, the officer was saying aloud my friend's rights as an arrestee. My heart couldn't sink any further and just stopped. My jaw had hit the ground. The girl next to me was crying, everyone else was just as shocked as I was. My friend had tears coming out of his eyes as he stood up, and in a nearly cinematic fashion, he was arrested facing us with a police car behind him, its lights silhouetting his figure. I began shouting. We all began shouting.
"What the hell is that? You're going to charge him with a FELONY?"
"You can't be serious!"
"This is bullshit!"
The officers largely ignored us. We saw him pushed into the back of a cop car, then get driven off. My mind was whirling. Cabs showed up and we were all ushered into them. Some of us went home, a few of us stayed together at another's house. The police were unbelievable. We stayed up all night swearing them out, talking about busting heads and punching puppies, venting our frustration.
The police were unbelievable.
My utter dislike and near hatred for them has kept up with me to this day. I absolutely detest dealing with them in any way. When I get pulled over, I cooperate in a patronizing manner. Whenever anything happens, I try to avoid calling the police as much as possible. As far as I'm concerned, all police officers are merely inferiority complex-ridden high school bullies who found the one job where they can legally bully people upon graduating. Kumar's big speech to the officer giving Harold a ticket for jaywalking in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle rang amazingly true so as to be inspirational to me.
The next morning, my friends were both released. The cross-faded idiot was released promptly at seven in the morning. We picked him up and dropped him off. The one charged with a felony had been released a few hours earlier. He called us out of the blue and said, "Holy shit you guys, when they were questioning me, I let slip that my dad is a cop in Cerritos and they just let me go! WHAT THE HELL??" There are many expressions I could write at this time, but dear lord, would they make a sailor blush and likely get me into trouble with the university.
As it would turn out, the police are permitted to lie about laws and their respective consequences on the scene. Using this as a tool, law enforcers can try to scare confessions out of alleged perpetrators; absolutely absurd, in my personal opinion, understandable in my rational one.
Just two years ago, here in Riverside, my car was broken into at my apartment's parking lot. I had been working as a photographer both freelance and for The Highlander for the university, and had come back exhausted from an assignment the night before. In my exhaustion, I had stupidly left a good amount of my equipment in my car before turning in. I lost nearly two thousand US dollars in equipment in one night. I called the police. I wasn't really sure what to expect. Two officers showed up. I had been swearing out loud, kicking the air and punching walls (something I do not recommend doing no matter how angry you are), but immediately went quiet. I was intimidated, I very well admit. However, they turned out to be very nice. They were very understanding, told me stories of how other similar cases generally turn out, and empathized with me. They stayed and talked with me after putting in their report for nearly half an hour. Midway through that, another group of students walked by to their cars. One of them littered a soda cup. The cop saw that, and his demeanor polarized.
"HEY PICK THAT UP, KID!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. I jumped.
The student quickly picked it up and ran.
The officer turned back to me and shrugged with a smirk on his face. "We just took a communication workshop the other day for work."
The police were unbelievable. The police are unbelievable. I have been on both sides of the law, both victim and perpetrator, and having been victim first, I can understandably, if not justifiably, say that I absolutely cannot stand them. It's hard NOT to get enraged when they are such jerks, assholes, and a whole manner of other things I cannot write here without consequence. They do all that with a smug little smirk on their faces that I would love to clean off with a closed fist. That, however, is my personal opinion. My rational opinion collides quite cleanly with this one. My rational side assures me that there are many things they do that I will never notice or know of that keep my life and lifestyle safe and that much more convenient and enjoyable. I hate having a rational side."
[This is all true, btw]
![[image loading]](http://bound4life.com/blog/system/files/17/original/PPfacility.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1063/1357452768_a128ed1948.jpg)
Lots of janitors actually refuse to pick up litter though, because that's not what they're paid to do (they're paid to clean dirty floors and maintain lightbulbs and crap...).
