Two Thumbs Down For Thumbs Up Program

I might lose some people with this rant, but I have to comment on an article in the OWH yesterday about the new Thumbs Up program started here in Omaha that is intended to “encourage Omahans to give police and firefighters a ‘thumbs-up’ as an expression of their gratitude and support.” One thing I have never understood is this worship of police and firefighters. Police and firemen are not all selfless human beings, sacrificing for the common good. The truth is that for most of these men in uniform their occupation is just that, a job. A good friend of mine is a cop, and his primary motivation for becoming a cop was the simple fact that he couldn’t see himself working in an office 8 hours a day. He certainly did not become a cop to be a hero, or to give service to the community. He viewed it as a solid career that fit his personality and actually paid quite well. Heck, he actually makes more than I do and more than most of my college educated friends as well. (My cop friend also has a college degree. I’m just pointing out that these friends I’m comparing him to aren’t bums). So it’s hard to see where he’s making such a grand sacrifice for the rest of us to the point where we need to thank him. We already do a pretty good job thanking these men and women with our hard-earned tax dollars.

In fact it is ironic that in this city, where we are forced to pay a special restaurant tax to make up for a huge shortfall of the police and fire pension fund, that local citizens would have the desire to go above and beyond to show gratitude to our police and firefighters. Remember, that shortfall exists because of the pervasive pension spiking that occurred for years that allowed police officers to retire with exorbitant pensions. If anything they should be thanking us for this windfall they reaped at our expense.

Another point I want to address is this idea that cops and firefighters have such dangerous jobs and that is why we should be so grateful for what they do. This article by Radley Balko, Senior Writer for Huffington Post, addresses this misconception. He points out that a law enforcement career is not “among the top ten most dangerous professions, falling well behind logging, fishing, driving a cab, trash collecting, farming and trucking.” (Note that firefighting did not make the top ten either.) Trash collecting is also vital to any community, and yet when do you ever hear about the danger garbage men face everyday? Of course if a garbage man gets killed on the job it doesn’t receive nearly the same amount of media attention that a cop getting killed does. Now I’m not saying that police and firefighters don’t have dangerous jobs, and those who actually have sacrificed their lives for others deserve all of the praise in the world. I just want to point out that most police and firefighters will in fact never have to make that sacrifice and actually do so less than many other professions.

One last point I want to make is this, in most collective groups of people there are always good and bad actors. You could be giving a thumps-up to a David Kofoed who is committing fraud to put innocent people in jail, for all you know. So my advice is this, if a cop or firefighter personally does a great job assisting you in his duties, especially if he seemingly goes above and beyond his duties, by all means shower him or her with praise and expressions of gratitude, but don’t shower with praise every cop you ever run into. You have no way of knowing whether he deserves it or not. If you still feel the need to do that, then I ask that the next time you see your local garbage man, give him a thumbs up as well.