Thank The Police

I don’t make much of a secret about this, but I’m a bit of a hooligan. By that, I mean that I’ve never shied away from fun regardless of the consequences that might come with it. And with an outlook like that, I’ve found myself at odds with authority plenty of times in my life. Without exception, however, my run-ins with the law have always been good natured if not completely legal.

I bring this up because the last couple of weeks on the H.A.M.B. have been incredibly tough for me. In our twenty-one years of existence, we’ve had some pretty crazy shit go down on the forum. We’ve had thieves infiltrate our ranks. We’ve had honest-to-goodness stalkers. We’ve had early morning suicide notes. We’ve had all kinds of malcontents.

But what we had a couple of weeks ago was without question the worst thing I’ve ever dealt with. I’ve gone sleepless. I’ve gone thoughtful beyond reason. I’ve gone damn near mad. And if it wasn’t for the help of police agencies on both a federal and local level, I don’t know if this was something I could have mentally survived.

I don’t mean to be cryptic or obtuse in anyway about this, but I don’t feel like I can really talk about exactly what happened yet… if ever… However, a few hundred of you were browsing the forums when this all went down and I’m guessing many of these folks have been staring at their own ceilings and questioning humanity right along with me. More or less, this post is for them.

There is all sorts of terrible shit in this world that you know about and even think about on occasion. However, dealing with it, handling it, and actually confronting it first hand is a much different animal. A good analogy would probably be war. You can watch the movies, read the books, know a friend in the military, and think about what it must be like to be on the front lines. But until you are right on the front lines, I doubt you could ever truly imagine what it is like to be opposite of a few thousand people aiming to kill you and your friends.

In this case, those front lines are manned by policemen and women. These people live and deal with on a daily basis what destroyed me after only a brief glimpse. As cliche as it might sound, they are absolute and total “heroes” by every definition of the word. And if you were one of the folks browsing the forum a couple of weeks ago when this went down, you need to know that these people did and continue to do their jobs. You can counter that disgust you have with the knowledge that there are people in the world that dedicate their lives to making it right.

Hug your local PoPo man… He or She deserves it.

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For obvious reasons, I’m gonna leave comments off on this one. If you have no idea what this is all about, excuse the interruption. We will get back to our regular programming right away. If you are one of the unfortunate and need to know more for your own mental health, just shoot me a convo.