The Pepper Spray Of Justice

One thing I really can't stand is getting hit in the face. We all get hit in the face at some point in our lives. Whether figuratively, as in when someone drops a gigantic emotional bomb on you and it feels like a nightstick to the face. Other times it is more in the literal sense, like when someone hits you in the face with a nightstick. Either way, the endgame involves you feeling brutalized.

As a younger man, like many of my gender before me, I had a mild dislike for the police. I believe this dislike was born of the teenage necessity to rebel against authority, that or the fact that N.W.A had just put out one of the catchiest, most anti-establishment songs of the twentieth century. I think you all know the song I am referring to. Whatever the mitigating factors, just about every teenage male I knew felt the same way: F*@$ the Police.

Now forget for a moment that I grew up in one of the safest and most affluent neighborhoods in Canada. Forget that the police involvement surrounding my adolescence helped to educate school kids about drugs, pioneered driving safety initiatives and assigned officers to troubled students to act as counselors. But why would I want you want to forget wonderful programs like that? Well, the state of mind of the standard teenager does not take these things into account; all they see is another form of control in the form of authoritarian mandates.

Now put that all aside and think of a place like Guatemala or Colombia where police initiatives usually involve brutal drug raids or facilitate disappearances of civilian dissidents.