When you witness a police officer committing a crime, who do you call? In Chicago and other big cities, it's too easy to be brushed off. If there are officers on the scene, well, what's the problem? B-b-b-b-but it's the officers who are robbing this place. It's a police sergeant who's punching and kicking a barmaid who thought he'd had enough to drink. It's the officers who are shaking down a motorist. Are you sure? Well, you can file a report maybe, or hope other officers will be sent. If you file a report and you happen to live in Chicago, you may as well plan to move. Having the Fraternal Order of Police mad at you isn't much better than pissing off the Mafia. If other officers are sent, the guilty ones may just say "We have this under control" and the new guys will dutifully leave. Maybe have a laugh about it at a favorite cop bar later, I suspect.

Now I happen to believe that most police officers are rightly motivated. They want to uphold the law, and they're not just thugs with guns and badges. Unfortunately, some are just that, thugs with guns and badges, and even more unfortunate, the code of silence prevents other officers from cleaning up their own house. At the end of the day, it's almost part of a police officer's job description to become a silent accessory to police crime. The officer who breaks that rule may simply get the cold shoulder, or may be framed for an offense of which he or she is innocent. In the worst case, the officer who tries to do the right thing may be rewarded by being set up to be injured or killed in the line of duty. How? Easy enough. "Murphy, you're just in time. Check out the garage while we go around the house." (Failing to mention that an armed offender was just seen entering the garage.)

Over time, organized civilians can and have successfully combatted police corruption, but in a condensed period of time, when you're the witness to a crime being committed by an officer, or the victim, you're close to helpless. If you try to intervene, you're taking your life in your hands, not to mention risking a charge of interfering with an officer performing his or her duties.

Of course it can happen everywhere. Police misconduct just happens to be one of many areas in which Chicago often excels. But remember the Forensic Files episode of the officer who got a warrant to arrest his former girlfriend on the basis of completely false accusations against her 15-year-old son? This happened in a non-metropolitan area (if memory serves me correctly). The woman had begged police authorities to keep him away from her home, but he pulled off this ruse and, during a raid on her home, went immediately to her bedroom. Knowing he was there to kill her, she made a dive for a night stand where she kept a gun, and an analysis of his first shot proved that he had not acted in self defense as he claimed. It took years to bring him to trial because of the reluctance of other officers to pursue justice in the case.

So what's the answer?

Obviously we could make police officers' careers more rewarding, pay them better, and do a lot better job of recruiting. Officers who show any sign of thinking their primary responsibility is to protect their own under all circumstances rather than serving and protecting the public should be re-evaluated and, if warranted, discharged. That's a long process, and it won't happen next year or in the next five years.

What can be done is to create, in each state, a division of the state police whose primary responsibility is to police the police. If I am being abused in some way by a police officer, a witness can call an alternative to 911. Say 811 or 922 or whatever. That goes immediately to this state police division which then dispatches officers on an emergency basis. If the local police or sheriff's deputies say "there's no problem," the state officers remain, observe, and make a report.

Will people abuse it? Some will of course. Someone who did so knowingly and maliciously should face charges for making a false police report. Perhaps at times it will be a matter of opinion. If I'm drunk and obnoxious, the police may think they're only restraining me, and my wife may think they've gone beyond necessary force and are committing aggravated battery. Sorry, but justice isn't always simple. Some will say this would tie the police's hands and prevent them from doing their jobs. I say it might make them think how much blood they want investigating officers from a different jurisdiction to find on me and my clothes, and officers who tend to act out of anger and frustration might decide to take a deep breath instead. Don't we have a right to expect as much of them as the law expects of the rest of us?

It would also help to pass a federal law against police abuse, making it a crime for one officer to cover the misdeeds of another or to fail to report a crime permitted by another officer. Drastic? Not in my opinion. Isn't respect for the law something America needs more of, at all levels?

And you see, fear of police and respect for the law are not the same thing. In fact, they work against each other.

If you disagree, please feel free to tell me. With what I've written here, I might have just made a lot of police officers hate my guts. But call me an idealist if you will, I think a lot more people who wear badges will think it's high time somebody got serious about this.

It happened in Florida recently. A strong and violent inmate jumped the 64-year-old security officer who was on duty alone at the jail and locked him in a strangle hold. In a few seconds, the guard could have been dead. Three other inmates came to his aid, saving his life. Some people will read that story and say "they just wanted to catch a break for themselves; they didn't give a good flying f---- about the guard's life." If that's what you assume automatically, you're part of the problem. Others will quickly say "it just shows that most people behind bars aren't bad at all, they're just victims of an unjust society." If that's your knee-jerk reaction, you're also part of the problem. When we stop looking for simplistic explanations and solutions, maybe we can start fixing some of America's serious problems.

Crime and how we deal with it is one of those serious problems. We have a violent crime rate that is shameful for an advanced, wealthy nation. We have more of our citizens behind bars than any other nation. About one in a hundred. Take everyone waiting for trial, and on probation or parole, and the portion jumps to one in thirty-seven. The average American household spends between $400 and $500 a year to keep people behind bars.

I believe the inmates-save-guard story demonstrates that not all offenders are cut out of the same cloth. Is that so difficult to understand? You'd think it's advanced rocket science considering that we let hard-core gang-bangers plea-bargain brutally violent crimes down to misdemeanors, that we are only beginning to apply everything behavioral science has taught us about rehabilitation programs, that we listen to pundits who say "rehabilitation doesn't work" but then elevate to hero status scumbags like Jack Abbott and Steve Stanko who happen to be slick and glib enough to charm gullible talking heads, that we lock out of jobs and educational programs people with long-past records of petty offenses . . .

A petty thief who steals to support a drug habit is not the same as a hard-core criminal who enjoys taking drugs, along with an occasional rape. A child molester is not the same as a shoplifter. A professional hot check artist who dislikes violence has little in common with the nine-to-five worker with a hot temper who periodically gets in brawls that put lives in danger, including his own. None of the preceding are necessarily similar to the flag-waving American who exercises his second amendment rights by keeping an arsenal in his bedroom, then blasts away the life of a neighbor he caught playing hoochy-koo with his wife.

We tend to paint all criminals with the same brush because it's easier and simpler, and cheaper in the short term, but it's much more expensive in the long term. We also tend to believe that anyone suspected of a crime is guilty, just like during the Inquisition. Too many police officers hold that belief and act on it, and we let them get by with it.

Acting as though all offenders and even accused offenders are stamped out of the same mold isn't just unfair. It helps keep our costs of incarceration so high, and our streets so dangerous.

Would we not all like to change that? What do you think? 

When I accused my nation collectively of qualifying for the admittedly unscientific definition of a sex addict, I promised that my next eruption of thought would explain why. Then, the Chicago Olympics fiasco came up, etc. (It's not you, honey, I was just too distracted to be interested in sex.) If you didn't read America is a sex addict, you can scroll down to it now. In my description of a hypothetical male sex addict, perhaps you already have an idea of why I level this accusation at the collective American psyche. That hypothetical person spends an inordinate amount of energy obsessing about sex, or looking for sexual titillation, or sexualizing every subject, or repressing his own sexual needs, or acting out in sexually inappopriate ways, or supressing other people's sexual freedom, or...need I go on?

Serially, or simultaneously, in any combination. Now, just consider some of the following.

We've had millions of dollars allocated for "abstinence only" sex education because there are parents and politcal powers who don't want children to even know about sex. During the impeachment of President Clinton, the words "oral sex" actually got into the news, and some parents protested "how am I supposed to explain that to my children?" I thought at the time if you can't tell your child about oral sex, you have a bigger problem than how Monica got white spots on her blue dress. In a Chicago suburb there was an interesting sculpture of three human figures, so abstract that they only vaguely resembled people, with a kind of scribble where one would expect pubic hair. It was on a major thoroughfare, and nicely broke up the monotony of suburban office parks ad nauseum. Then suddenly it had been moved into a grove of trees, barely visible from the road. I never asked, but I'm sure what happened was the same thing that happened to Michaelangelo's sculpture of David: Somone was shocked that he had genitalia. When a female performance artist's breast was exposed for a fraction of a second at a Superbowl halftime, the uproar that resulted was deafening, and even though the woman's nipple and aureola were concealed, the network was fined $550,000 for "indecency."

It can be argued that our government nearly stopped functioning during the inquisition into whether or not Monica Lewinsky had actually performed oral sex on President Clinton in the Oval Office. Through some bizarre reasoning this was supposedly related to whether or not he may have, years earlier, exposed his genitals to one Paula Jones, an employee of the State of Arkansas when he was governor. How one divides the cost of this investigation between Clinton's "b.j." and the Whitewater bubble is open to debate, but there is no doubt it was many millions of dollars. By contrast, less than a half million was spent on investigating whether the tragedy of 9-11 could have been prevented. (This is without assigning a dollar value to having the national security adviser commit contempt of Congress.)

One of those who cast the most and biggest stones at Clinton is now a governor. His political career is over because he's a married guy with a girlfriend. Apparently he spent some state monies to finance his foreign trips to see her, but the tidal wave of indignation was over his marital infidelity. A former presidential hopeful, John Edwards, is now a dark horse at best after his extra-marital affair was disclosed.

So we are shocked and indignant at the dalliances of our elected officials, and at the same time amused and titillated. We're afraid of sex and obsessed with it at the same time. The most popular issue of Sports Illustrated is the famous Swimsuit Issue, with so-called swimsuits that are about as concealing as two Band-Aids and a cork. Any major city has page after page of "escort" ads in its yellow pages, even though the "full service" for which the so-called escorts and their agencies receive the bulk of their income is illegal; ask Elliot Spitzer.

We may be horrified at stories of young women in third world countries being stoned to death for having consensual sex, but some American parents resist having their daughters vaccinated for human pappiloma virus; their refusal is like saying to the daughter "if you should have sex with a man who carries HPV, even if he's your husband, I want you to die for it." No matter that the girl's father may be purchasing pornography featuring "barely legal" females.

We devote valuable police efforts to arresting prostitutes and their customers, often with sensational televised street stings, while the aforementioned escort services operate more or less openly. In many cities, totally nude dancing is permitted in "gentlemen's clubs" that may not sell alcoholic beverages. Similar clubs sell alcohol, but women dancers are required to wear g-strings, which (barely) cover the pubis plus pasties over the nipples. Often the pasties are actually "cheaters," made to look identical to nipples. Male patrons stimulating themselves through their clothing may be arrested, and the club may be punished as well. In a club that sells alcohol, in most cases a glimpse of labia puts the liquor license at risk.

It's not uncommon for someone to be arrested for nude sunbathing in a fenced area on their own property that is almost impossible to view from an adjacent property. A woman exposing her breasts on a balcony, even at a free-for-all celebration like Mardis Gras, is subject to arrest. Changing clothes on a public beach can land you in jail. Yet we love music videos that would be less sexually provocative if the performers were nude, and dance contests that are borderline striptease acts.

Homophobia is everywhere in America, and men are subject to being murdered for the crime of having been born gay. Self-proclaimed prophet Jimmy Swaggart, the same one who bawled like a baby on nationwide television after it became public knowledge that he humped hookers even more often than he waved Bibles, announced that he would kill any man who ever looked at him "that way" and happily answer to God for it. Another famous homophobe, one Ted Haggard, was forced to make a public confession that he had indulged his urges to have sex with men. Senator Larry Craig, who had resisted gay rights laws and admission of homosexuals into the military, was arrested for soliciting other men for sex in an airport restroom and entered a guilty plea, which he later tried to rescind when the matter became public knowledge. That's when other men came forward to report that the good senator had volunteered to polish their own knobs in public restrooms.

Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down all state sodomy laws in 2003, engaging in anal intercourse even with your spouse could earn you a prison sentence in many states, and in some, even oral intercourse was a crime. In Michigan, a first offense for sodomy, with the same or opposite sex, could be punished by 15 years in prison, and a second offense by a life sentence. To the best of my knowledge, the first state to repeal its sodomy laws was Illinois, in 1962. Florida's law stayed on the books until 2003, but the sentence was $1000 fine and 60 days in jail, compared to Michigan's 15 years! And it's supposed to be the same nation, right?

Our age of consent laws are a complete hodge podge. What is not even a misdemeanor in one state can earn you a long prison sentence in another. The minimum age at which a minor may legally consent to sexual intercourse ranges from 14 to 18. In most states, it's illegal to show pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18, so in a state like Michigan, for example, where the age of consent is 16, you could legally have sex with a consenting 16-year-old but go to prison for showing him or her a copy of Hustler. It's strange enough that you could be labeled a sex offender for the rest of your life for having sex with a consenting post-pubertal teenager, but downright bizarre that the same thing could happen for letting a 17-year-old see an "adult" video.

Along with nude dancing, pornography is now legal in most places, but stores that specialize in sexually oriented videos and magazines plus "sex toys" generally have darkened windows and are prohibited from being located near schools and churches, and most frequently are confined to marginal retail areas. In some cases, an established sex store has had to move after a school or church opens in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, cable television is flooded with ads for products promising to cure erectile dysfunction, and others promising to increase the size of the penis, or that "certain part of the male body" as one spokeswoman seductively describes it to the camera. Dozens of TV spots throughout the day for exercise regimens and machines emphasize appearance over all else. The most important thing in life for a woman is to have firm breasts, a tight abdomen, shapely buttocks, beautiful legs, and in general to look like one of those "barely legal" porn stars. For a man it's the same tight abs, plus bulging pecs and biceps, and plenty of youthful hair.

Of course most of us won't look like the ideal sex object no matter what we do. Small wonder so many just give up and eat themselves into type II diabetes, making us the most obese nation on earth. After all, you could always have that indescribably wonderful sexual experience by just hiring an ideal sex object to make it happen, but oops! That's illegal.

I'm not even going to get into all of the ways you can qualify as a sex offender. Don't get me wrong. I take sexual coercion very seriously. I think, however, that we've gone overboard in how we define it. We're not much better than one of those third world countries in some instances, like so many restrictions on where a registered sex offender can live that some are limited to sleeping under bridges.

OK, enough about our messed up national sex life. If that's abnormal, what's normal? There are plenty of places where sexual mores are more strict than in the U.S. of A., and plenty more where they're more relaxed. I doubt there are many where they are more inconsistent. For the sake of contrast, I'll just tell you of one country I know something about personally, Germany.

One of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world is in Heidelberg. A substantial portion of Germany's population is Catholic, and the Christian Democrat party is one of the nation's most powerful. Membership in the party is not limited to Catholics, and most Orthodox Jews favor the Christian Democrats. Less than a block away from the cathedral is a sex shop, with a large sign proclaiming it as such. The windows are clear, the aisles are wide, the inside is brightly lit, and individuals and couples of all ages come and go openly.

The age of consent in Germany is fourteen. There are special laws to protect a child from coercion, and someone over the age of 21 can be prosecuted for taking undue advantage of the naivete of a 14- or 15-year-old, but it takes a compliant from the minor for a prosecution to occur.

When I've visited Germany, I did not see the overwhelming preoccupation with sex that exists in America. Some women wear revealing clothing, but the average is not at all shocking. While I haven't seen sexually provocative images being used to promote everything under the sun, on one trip I noticed some large posters featuring an attractive oblique rear view of a nude female; erotic, perhaps, but not obscene, and they didn't cause any kind of stir that I was aware of. Nor had anyone found it necessary to deface them or add juvenile sexual comments.

In Heilbronn, when my wife and I visited, there was a display of modern sculptures throughout the downtown pedestrian shopping area. All of these were nude. One which I'm sure would have caused an outrage in most American cities was a bronze of a woman's midsection, legs spread, with an artistic impression of the genitalia. It was interesting but certainly not erotic. I couldn't resist having my wife take a portrait of me, framed by the sculpture. If we wanted to be literal about it, you could say the abstract vagina would have appeared to be a few inches above my head. An elderly couple watching our picture-taking waved and laughed approvingly.

Freiburg im Briesgau is a colorful city of about a quarter million on the edge of the Black Forest, rich with medieval architecture and surrounded by natural beauty. In the center of the city is a plaza with an unusual fountain. Water runs around a circular ceramic trough, through a drain, where it is pumped back up into two square sculptures, about 18" x 18" x 24" high, if memory serves me well, from which it spills back into the circular trough. Very pleasant and restful, and amusing. You see, the the sculptures are chiseled to resemble human forms, one male, one female. The male is returning water to the trough from a small pipe protruding from -- you guessed it -- the groin area. The female, if you take a second look, appears to have her skirt slightly raised and her contribution to the trough is running from between her feet. In other words, both are represented as "peeing" into the trough. Among the families and groups of school children in the area, I didn't see any teachers or parents instructing anyone to close their eyes, and no one seemed the slightest embarrassed. On the city's magnificent cathedral are fearsome gargoyle figures, created in medieval times. Most are placed to direct rainwater away from the wall, typically through a screaming mouth. Many, however, are positioned to take in the runoff through a mouth and discharge it away from the wall via a cloacal opening. Like the fountain, created hundreds of years more recently, these are creative, rather tongue-in-cheek, and don't shock anyone. Except, perhaps, some prudish tourists.

For all practical purposes, prostitution is legal in Germany for anyone over the age of eighteen. The system is not perfect, and the government periodically tries different methods of limiting, licensing, and taxing prostitution. In Munich, near the famous Hoffbrauhaus, is a cabaret named the Lola Montez. In case you don't know, Lola Montez was the stage name of an Irish woman who became a Spanish dancer, then the mistress of Kind Ludwig I of Bavaria, and later moved to California during the gold rush. My wife and I stopped in for a few drinks and watched the nude dancers one evening, and enjoyed watching another interesting show: German efficiency in the world's oldest profession. Three men entered and took a booth not far from us. After about twenty minutes and one drink, three attractive women, obviously summoned by the management, approached the table, and one of them saying almost formally "Also, guten Abend," or roughly, "Well now, good evening." Individual men were approached by individual women. Pairs were approached by pairs. Some male-female pairs moved to tables where privacy could be assured by a curtain. Some left together. But unless we had been traumatized by knowing what was taking place, nothing happened that would have made my wife and me feel uncomfortable, nor did any of the other obviously married couples in the place seem to offended. I'm sure that many Germans would not go to the Lola Montez or any other such establishment, but the clientele certainly was not limited to riff-raff. Given the kind of transactions that were taking place, I have to say it was done rather tastefully.

On another visit to Munich I spent some time in a park along the Issar River, where people of all ages sunbathed, waded, and swam. A few of both sexes went a little distance from the main crowd and changed clothes, stripping naked and putting on bathing suits. No one stared, or objected. I couldn't help thinking how easily any of them could have been arrested in the U.S., and even been labeled as sex offenders.

One evening my wife and I were watching television with another couple. A female reporter was covering a soccer match. The camera followed her into the locker room where she spoke to some of the players as they prepared to shower, standing there for all the world to see, talking to a woman, with it hanging there plain as the nose on one's face. Without self-consciousness or apparent shame. It was a brief segment, and wasn't done for sensationalism. Our friends, both German, laughed a little about it, and said "well, if you want an interview right after the game, you go to the locker room, and in a locker room, people are naked, so?"

If you're one of those people who believe that America is the ideal in every way, you could easily say "well, Fauteck, if you like Germany so much better than the U.S. why don't you get the hell out and go live there!" Fact is, I love America. I also love my grandchildren, but I know they need to grow up, and I think that's true of my country as well, as I've said before. Or you might say "that's just fine for them; it sounds like a place with low moral standards and we just don't want to live like that."

I disagree. Let me just give you three facts to chew on.

Rape is only a third as common in Germany as it is here. America has 4.7 times as many teen pregnancies per capity as Germany, and 3.4 times as many abortions. Still think our moral standards are superior?

I've been to other nations where the attitude toward sexuality is much more conservative than Germany's. I've never been anywhere, or even heard of another place, where it is more inconsistent than in America. We're not oversexed or undersexed; we're just, collectively, sexually confused and obsessed. Just like a sex addict. 

Let's get this out of the way first: "Sex addiction" is not a scientific diagnosis of a mental disorder. If we trace it back, we'd probably find that the term was first used by one of those who think everyone belongs in a half dozen 12-step groups and that any problematic behavior is a disease. As a practical matter, however, I believe most psychologists, even those who are sticklers for correct language like myself, know that there are people whose sexual behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and values are problematic in various ways. If there's such a thing as the collective American psyche, I believe that would describe us.

Let's take a hypothetical male sexual addict. He may be such a prude that he wants bikini bathing suits banned from the beaches, but goes to strip clubs. He's often unable to perform sexually, or avoids sex altogether by pursuing work and hobbies to exhaustion. At other times he's insatiable, and pays for several encounters with prostitutes in one day. He strongly suspects that his wife may be having an affair with a man from their bridge club, and at the same time finds the idea somewhat stimulating. He has mixed feelings about sex education in grade school and thinks the textbooks are sometimes too explicit. Yet he's the one whose jokes at office parties are so off-color that they embarrass others.

Depending on the attitude of his mate, he may eventually join a swinging club and spend an inordinate portion of his time planning get-togethers with other couples.

Or he may wind up divorced, spending most of his spare time at a computer looking for increasingly exotic pornography.

Or he may become celibate, with an occasional binge of sexual adventures.

In other words, his sexual maladjustment has made his overall life to a large extent dysfunctional. I think that describes America.

To be sure, we're not the worst. In my opinion, a nation that allows the "honor killing" of a daughter because she may have been raped simply has no honor. Likewise nations where men are so insecure that they require women to be obscured from public view, or allow women to be subjected to genital mutilation. The collective psyche of those nations is gynophobic and psychopathic. We don't even come close.

But we may be the worst among the major industrialized nations, or what I think of as the most enlightened nations.

The next time I sit at the keyboard, I'll go into detail on this. I'll tell you why I think our sexual attitudes and behaviors are so paradoxical and problematic. But why wait? If there are reasons you agree, please hit the "comment" button. On the other hand, if you think America is well adjusted sexually and I simply have my head up my arse, well, please hit the "comment" button and tell me why.

In my lifetime I've heard the Bible quoted to justify pacificism and war, integration and segregation and even slavery, isolationism and internationalism, capitalism and socialism, forced castration and free love, vows of poverty and obscene self indulgence, missionary work to build hospitals and clinics around the world and denial of basic medical care while children die. In many ways, the Bible is like a Rorschach test; you see in it what you want to see. If you want to see that God hates anyone who isn't a chest-pounding beer-swilling heterosexual, it's easy enough.

In the 19th chapter of Genesis, Lot is living in Sodom. Who knows why if it was such a horrible place. Two angels visit him, disguised as travelers. The men of the city pound on Lot's door and demand that he turn them over "so that we may know them." That's been taken to mean "know" as in copulate, since Lot offers his daughters as a substitute. The guys outside weren't interested. Some could say they only wanted men. But we're not talking about consensual intercourse here, a heterosexual or homosexual orgy; we're talking about gang rape. Lot's daughters were residents. The angels in disguise were outsiders. The Sodomites didn't take kindly to travelers, routinely beating and robbing them.

That was a time when the survival of the human species was tenuous at best, and it was considered a high moral imperitive to show hospitality to travelers. In that light, Lot's willingness to let the mob have their way with his daughters, hopefully returning them sorely misused but alive, is more forgivable. Given the tenuousness of human survival, his daughters' later plot to become pregnant by their father, believing there were no other males left on earth, is not so strange.

Don't take my word for it. In one of the many times that God was pissed off at Israel, he sent this message through Ezekiel (16:46-50):

It's a tragic story in today's news. Police in California were chasing a car for a "traffic infraction." It turned into one of those wild scenes with one driver #1 determined to do anything to get away, and driver #2 willing to do anything to catch driver #1. It's great filler for TruTV and the like, with a narrator describing the action as though it were a football game, as the pursued drives over median strips and down the wrong side of expressways, knocks down traffic lights, hits other vehicles, jumps out of the car and runs through a few backyards, and eventually a more athletic police officer catches and cuffs the offender.

Seven people are dead from this chase. Three in the car that was being chased, and four children in a pickup it smashed into after ignoring a red light. I doubt that the "traffic infraction" could have justified three death penalties. Certainly the children were innocent victims. You can point out, correctly, that it was the driver who chose to flee who caused the fatal accident. I can also point out, however, that the police could have prevented it by simply saying "This isn't worth it" and stopping the chase. Radio the state police, give a description, and go have donuts.

Maybe a police officer from Dinuba, California, was thinking "This is my chance to be on TV!" Or "They think I'm some small town hick cop! I'll show them!" Or "They must have done something really bad! Maybe there's a body in the trunk! Or a hundred kilos of cocaine!" Or maybe the officer was just driving under the influence of testosterone. Or department policy demanded continuing the chase.

True, maybe the occupants of the car were wanted for murder, were prison escapees, we transporting drugs and knew they were facing a possible life sentence, or were stoned out of their minds. In the majority of those chases, the motivations of the fleeing driver are much less spectacular. But even if the officer knew that one of these was true, it wouldn't merit so much risk to innocent people.

Once in a great while it's possible, just possible, that the driver police are pursuing is a serial killer, and has victim #9 bound and gagged on the back seat, and, seeing that the chase is getting dangrous, the police back off, and the driver kills six more people before being apprehended. Possible, not probable. More probable are tragedies like today.

To put it in perspective, imagine this scene: A convicted murderer escapes from prison. A police officer spots him in an indoor shopping mall and makes a positive identification. Although he's 100 feet away, the officer is a good marksman and can probably hit the escapee with the first shot. There is no one directly between the two of them, just other people behind and to the side. I'm not a police officer, but I'd be willing to bet that, under those circumstances, the officer would not fire. He or she would radio for backup, perhaps the mall would be sealed, or the officer might try to follow the escapee without being noticed, but I can't imagine letting the lead fly.

How do we change it? Maybe a small step would be to stop showing the live footage for television entertainment. Another would be for respected law enforcement associations to formally discourage dangerous car chases. Individual law enforcement agencies should make it a firm policy for such chases to cease when they endanger the public. It should require approval of a high-ranking supervisor to continue a chase when it appears that apprehension of the offender, even at the risk of "collateral damage," i.e., loss of innocent lives, is in the public interest.

With cooperation among agencies, in some circumstances the fleeing vehicle can safely be blocked off further down the road, perhaps when the driver thinks he or she is no longer a subject of interest. Aerial pursuit is another possibility. Ideally the driver would not even know the pursuit is happening until deciding to stop for a cup of coffee. I believe today's advanced technologies offer additional possibilities, but that's a whole other topic. For now, if it's a choice between a breath-taking chase and just letting some jerk get away, I say let the jerk get away.

It shouldn't be a joking matter. Medicare fraud hits all of us in the pocketbook, and distracts us from streamlining and modernizing our decrepit healthcare system. Ironically, I remember when Medicare was first proposed, and there were those who screamed about "socialized medicine" then as now, who predicted that millions of larcenous seniors were going to abuse the system. Maybe they meant getting five more minutes with a physician than they were entitled to, but there was always that hint that somehow Grandpa would turn his physician's bills into a condo on the Riviera.

Sorry. It's not those cagey old codgers. It's physicians and other healthcare providers. I haven't heard recently of any hospital corporations defrauding Medicare, but since I know from personal experience that some routinely defraud their patients, I won't be shocked to learn that they victimize the taxpayers as well.

So, why shouldn't they? It's easy money, with very little risk. Just recently an Arizona man got two and a half years behind bars for stealing a quarter million. He had to pay it back, and after he serves his thirty months with however much time off for good behavior, he'll have a few years of probation. Still, when you compare that with the twenty years you can get for stealing $100 with a gun, or the life sentence you could get for a drug offense, it's a pretty high-profit low-risk business.

Another example from some years ago: A certain psychiatrist, who worked part-time in the same court-support agency with me, used to spend a few hours a week doing his private practice billing on his county payroll job. No problem, since it was during downtime. Then it turned out that some of that billing was to Medicare, and over $300,000 of it was fraudulent. Federal charges were filed and he was fired immediately by the circuit court, but it wasn't a great job anyway. I'm sure he had to pay back what he stole, and let's say he was fined a half million bucks (I don't know), but to my knowledge, he never spent a day behind bars.

To other successful psychiatrists whose total honest incomes might be a half million a year or more, that might not seem like a terrible risk. Just like, to the kid in the ghetto, a little time in prison might not seem so much worse than life on the streets.

Truthfully, I wouldn't do it, no matter what. A few years back I got a couple of louvred glass storm doors from a home center, without having paid more than a small deposit. I took the trouble to go to the store, insist they find the record of the sale, and let me pay what I owed. There was a time in my distant past when I certainly would have done no such thing! If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my other website, going-straight.com For the last fifty years I don't take things that aren't mine, I don't steal from people, and I consider paying what I owe in taxes a patriotic duty. I hope that's true of you as well. But for anyone who is easily tempted, who just happens to have an MD or Psy.D. or RN after his or her name, or happens to own a hospital or medical supply company, or for any other reason submits charges to Medicare, the risk is too low.

I liked the guy down the hall, and it would be hard to think of him in a cell, but logically, I know that's what he deserved. When politicians talk about getting tough on crime, they usually mean getting tough on poor people who hurt rich people. I say it's time to get tough, very tough, on rich people who hurt all of us. Maybe in China they'd get a bullet to the back of the head. I don't advocate that. I do advocate giving them seriously long vacations at the Crossbars Resort.

Sex is a powerful drive, and humans are the most sexually driven species on earth. Although we could now argue that humans are the most successful species on earth, we can just as believably argue that we are the most fragile, and as recently as early biblical times, our very survival was tenuous. With a gestation period of nine months, a typical litter size of one, and a high infant mortality rate, it was that constant urge to "get it on" that assured a birth rate that at least matched the death rate. Can you imagine a real Wilma Flintstone telling Fred "We really need to start to work on another human being. I won’t be as much help for a while, and the business of popping him out will be a bitch, and it just might kill me, and he’ll probably be dead before he’s old enough to be very useful and meanwhile we’ll have to work even harder with our hunting and gathering. But someday, Fred, they’ll honor us for helping our species survive and people will make funny cartoons about us."

More likely it was something like "I’m still hungry and this cave is never warm enough. How about we do that thing again where you [well, we can omit the details, right? and I’m not sure exactly how cave people did it anyway] and we won’t feel cold and hungry for a while."

To which Fred probably said "I’m ready, Wilma. You are just soooo cute in those woolly mammoth-ear slippers. Hey, did you know that guy who rubs sticks together says that babies come from [don’t worry, I’m not going to describe it]."

"Those damned scientists. Next thing they’ll be telling us that it’s tiny bugs that make us sick."

Or if you prefer the Adam and Eve story, well, OK, you can imagine a comparable version, with the first two humans glumly leaving the Garden of Eden with the sex manual that God thoughtfully provided, trying to figure out what the reference to "children" meant.

Anything as universally powerful as sex is going to be subject to rules and regulations. Whether you like it or not, that’s the way it is. People don’t always agree on them. That’s another fact of life we have to live with. In the Judeo-Christian world, a guy named the Apostle Paul (who didn’t care much for women, according to most exegetes) decided that sex between unmarried people was a terrible sin, equal in gravity to adultery. That was new, and Jesus is never quoted as having objected to sex outside of marriage, but most branches of Christianity have run with it, and extreme Islam has treated it as a death penalty offense.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, that urge is strong as ever, but childbirth isn’t as much of a horror as it used to be, at least in places where women are treated as human beings and allowed adequate medical care. In advanced nations the majority of infants do survive to adulthood, and our species is, if anything, in danger of overpopulating our planet, rather than dying out because of insufficient replacement.

Recreational sex has never been as rare as many people think. It’s been relatively commonplace throughout history, as have various forms of contraception and abortion. In modern society, though, sexuality is more supercharged than ever. The onset of puberty is coming earlier and earlier, yet the age at which a young person can be truly self sufficient comes later and later.

It is now possible, and increasingly commonplace, for children of ten or eleven, or even younger, to procreate. It’s also possible with contraceptives for equally young children to be vigorously active sexually, with highly reduced chance of pregnancy resulting. When the contraceptives fail, as contraceptives do, where it is legal abortion is safer than ever. Please note that I am NOT saying that this is good; only that it is true.

When pre-pubertal children played doctor and nurse, the worst that was likely to occur was horrified parents and, sadly, sometimes bestially cruel punishment. When pubescent children experiment, however young they may be, biology may lead to very different results. I.e., pregnancy.

I personally cannot equate a fertilized egg with a human being, and certainly cannot fathom the belief that a fertilized egg has the same rights as a nine or ten year old child, or any living human being, for that matter. If you believe otherwise, that is your right, so long as you do not force it on me or anyone else. I know this will make some parents furious, but honestly, I do not think you have the right to force that belief on your pregnant daughter. At the same time, I cannot in good conscience say that a child who is too young to sign a legal contract should be able to demand a serious surgical procedure such as abortion as easily as buying a package of bubble gum. Our concepts of when adult responsibility begins are always troubled. They vary from time to time and place to place. Early in the 20^{th century, laws were passed in some American cities making it illegal to prostitute a child younger than nine! The age of consent in Michigan is sixteen, but if you show a pornographic picture to the 16-year-old you’re having sex with, you’re committing a felony. Children in their early teens can be tried as adults, but can’t buy alcohol legally. In fact, young Americans can be sent to die defending their nation when we’re under attack (or at the whim of a delusional president) as much as four years before they can legally buy a can of beer.}

Wouldn’t this curdle your blood, if it were true: "I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth. And that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity or authority of the persons ... at any time I may be directed to do so by the agents of the Pope. . . ."

That supposedly was from the oath of the Knights of Columbus. Neither it nor anything vaguely similar was ever used by the K of C, but it was believed by many to be the real thing. I remember being exposed to it at least three times, always by Protestant Evangelicals. Sadly, tragically, we’ve learned over the last few decades of sexual abuse in some monasteries and nunneries and other Catholic institutions, including local parishes, but a few decades ago many Bible-thumping preachers denounced everything Catholic constantly. Every priest was a sex fiend, and every Catholic Church’s foundation walls hid the bones of human sacrifice. According to some, young nuns were routinely raped by priests, impregnated, and their babies baptized then murdered. Of course, the Pope’s secret armies were ready to declare holy wars around the world at a moment’s notice.

Around that same time, while the Catholic Church may have been ignoring and even covering up some corruption in its ranks, it wasn’t waging the same level of War of Words against Protestantism. Admittedly, the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics along with blacks and Jews, but the Church didn’t accuse all of "them," i.e., Protestants, with planning the violent destruction of Catholicism. The more-or-less official attitude toward Protestantism was that it simply was invalid. It was better, a well-informed Catholic told me, not to let "them" think that they could possibly have any religious view or opinion of any value. God spoke through His Church, not through anyone else. If any subset of Protestants had any truth whatever, it was what they had accidentally retained from Catholicism.

Enter the abortion issue. With the new doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin, the Catholic Church had redefined life as starting at conception. A fertilized egg is a human being, period. So abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, is murder, period. Evangelical Christians, many of whom formerly viewed anything Catholic as a creation of Satan, heartily embraced that definition, sometimes with kukluxian fervor and lawlessness. Meanwhile Catholics, who had often been a hated minority in our nation and so had chosen not to make waves unnecessarily, adopted evangelical revivalist militancy against what it had now defined as mass murder.

Strange bedfellows indeed. Ironic, and sad, because in our troubled times, religion has been a source of comfort and hope for so many of us. We don’t need to divert its power into fake holy wars, bloody or bloodless.

As I’ve admitted previously, I’m no theologian, but it seems obvious to me that the "Old Testament," which both Catholics and Protestants embrace, in Exodus 21:22-25, spells out that causing the death of a fetus is a property crime, not murder. Also, if murder is the taking of a human being’s life, and a human being is a living organism, then abortion cannot be murder because the fetus is not an independent organism. It is POTENTIAL human life because it has the POTENTIAL to become an independent organism.

I do not believe it rational to propose that abortion should be taken lightly. It’s a very serious decision, whether to bring a new person into the world or not. However, I also do not think it is rational to leave that decision to any level of government. It is the decision of the human being most affected, the mother, in consultation with her physician, and hopefully with her family and the male who contributed the sperm.

Certainly it should NEVER be left up to crackpots with guns and bombs.

This still leaves the question of parental notification unanswered. I’ve heard only two answers to the question, and in my opinion, both of them fall short. Very soon, I’ll give you what I believe is a sensible alternative.

The stories are so frequent that we’ve become desensitized: Someone is freed after spending a major part of life behind bars, sometimes thirty years or more, because DNA evidence has proven the person innocent.

This phenomenon calls for some courageous new thinking about the supposed infallibility of eyewitness testimony, about our trial procedures in general, and about how much coercion and trickery police should be allowed to obtain a so-called confession. But it virtually SCREAMS for a rethinking of the death penalty. That’s because many of these exonerated parties had spent time on death row, sometimes just days away from execution.

There are many reasons to question the appropriateness of the death penalty. The most obvious is the fact that it is permanent, irreversible, and no amount of compensation by a court or legislature can even begin to right the wrong of an innocent person being killed by society.* There are many more, however:

Threat of the death penalty can frighten an innocent person into signing a false confession. I can’t count how many defendants have told me that interrogating officers said something like "If you don’t admit you did it, you’ll get a lethal injection." Can you imagine how effective that is with a detainee, frightened out of his/her wits, who has been questioned around the clock?

Similarly, fear of the death penalty may push an innocent defendant to accept a plea bargain.

The death penalty is NOT cost effective. The expense of numerous appeals and the cost of keeping prisoners on death row for years is greater than the typical cost of keeping a convicted murderer in prison for fifty years. (We could change that by executing a convicted killer with a bullet to the head an hour after the trial, and making his or her family pay for the bullet, but we are not, thank God, that kind of society.)

Ours is the only leading western nation that still uses the death penalty. This doesn’t help our image in the rest of the world, and makes other nations reluctant to extradite suspects to the United States.

In blunt terms, the death penalty doesn’t serve as a deterrent. Our murder rate is higher than that of any of those other leading western nations, and 3.5 times higher than Italy, the holder of the second-place title on that list. Among states of the U.S. that still have the death penalty, the murder rate per 100,000 people is 5.3, and among non-death penalty states the rate is 2.8, just over half as much.

No doubt some avid death penalty advocates will contact me, quoting Genesis 9:6: "Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed..." I’m not here to promote or dispute anyone’s religion, nor is it my business to debate how the Bible came to be. There are three other points, however, that I believe shouldn’t be ignored: In that same book of the Bible, death at the hands of humanity was not imposed on Cain for killing Abel, and was, in fact, forbidden; a life sentence to prison wasn’t a viable option back then, and; under rules for imposition of the death penalty in Biblical times, it was almost never applied.

It’s long past time to kill the death penalty forever in our nation.

*In a case where the death penalty was imposed on an innocent party because a police officer knowingly coerced a false confession, or a prosecutor knowingly repressed exculpatory evidence, isn’t it logical that the officer or the prosecutor should be charged with attempted murder? If the wrongful conviction is revealed after the innocent party has been put to death, would a charge of murder be inappropriate? If that happened, I wonder how favorably the officer or prosecutor would think of the death penalty.