>Rowdy in Ridgewood : We, as a community, seem to demand total control and just don’t tolerate even the remote possibility of any chaos.
I don’t know why everyone is so uptight these days.
Sure, I don’t want to go out for a fine time with my lady and get punched in the face or have someone barf on my girl but that’s why we leave before 2 am. Maybe we, as a regulated society, don’t feel comfortable letting people stagger home because we feel an over-arching need to regulate every breath they take from cradle to grave. Maybe, if we let one person lay down in their own vomit, we would lose the ability to rob them of every ounce of empowerment, money and innate human ability they might possess.
Calling in police from two other towns reminds me of the day the Ridgewood Planning Board made a last minute switch of venue for its final vote on the Valley rezoning. I recall the meeting was moved at the last moment from a location with tremendous capacity and parking to the totally inadequate venue of the GW School. Literally, thousands of residents were upset as what appeared to be the capstone of underhanded behavior in this completely one-sided push to turn our village into Valley’s dog sled. It’s not that the police are to blame for over-reacting. That didn’t happen. In fact, it was the bad act of the Planning Board that precipitated the need to call-in three towns’ police. For one perfect moment, the Planning Board had the police to do their blocking and tackling with the public locked out. In a less-perfect world, the police would have told the Planning Board…don’t expect us to do your dirty work, you intentionally created this mess, now face your neighbors!
We, as a community, seem to demand total control and just don’t tolerate even the remote possibility of any chaos. We expect total order and controlled behavior at all times no matter the context or personal cost. That type of rigid thinking and behavior is not nature’s way. It’s a prison we have put ourselves into. And I feel bad for the police who operate under an unrealistic mandate to keep the lid on a societal pressure cooker we’ve created. The police are good people.
