If you missed listening to the show as much as I missed being in the studio today, please tune in tomorrow, Sunday, September 18, from 2pm-3pm. Bob and I have been “bumped” because WHK has contractual obligations to broadcast college football during the fall.

“Contractual Obligations?” How’s THAT for “REAL LAW!”

We will be on the air on Sundays from 2pm to 3pm for the next four weeks.

Check this blog frequently. I will post schedule updates as soon as I know about them.

Hope to talk to you tomorrow. Call us at 888-281-1110 and let us know what’s on your mind.

During the past week, we have heard much about the legacy of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We will hear and read more, I am sure, of the “lessons learned from 9/11.”

According to some we learned that “We are vulnerable.” Did we really learn our vulnerability just ten years ago? Did we not learn it at Pearl Harbor, or in Viet Nam, or aboard the USS Cole, or at the World Trade Center in 1993? Others have said we learned the consequences of our national arrogance. As early as November, 2001, historian Mary Beard said, “however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming.”

“America is solidly organized egoism, it is evil made systematic and regular,” said Pierre Buchez in the 1840’s, when this country was, at best, attempting to become a regional power, more than a century away from being the sole remaining world “superpower.”

To his credit, in a December, 2001, Time Magazine article, Lance Morrow pointed out the irony of taking upon ourselves the “arrogance” described above in the aftermath of an attack motivated by twisted religious zeal. “What is more arrogant than a vocabulary of “infidel,” “jihad” and “fatwa”? More arrogant than the totalitarian conceit that Allah obliges ‘the faithful’ to wage vicious holy war against the airplanes and office buildings of the ungodly?”

Whatever we may have learned on September 11, 2001, or during the time since, we have not learned the two most important lessons.

1. The world is not a safe place.

No matter how many times you have taken an evening stroll around the block in your neighborhood, tomorrow may still be the day that you get mugged around the corner. No matter how peaceful your involvement in matters that are important to you, there will always be people who disagree. Some of those people will debate you, some of them will shout at you, and some will adopt the tactics of Jared Loughner, Timothy McVeigh, and Mohammed Atta.

On 9/11, we did not learn our vulnerability, but we were reminded of it.

2. We can’t make the world a safe place.

Were it possible to live in absolute safety with unlimited liberty, my services as a police officer would no longer be needed, and I would celebrate my unemployment. Unfortunately, it is not possible. There will always be those who take advantage of an open society to do it or its members harm.

We continue willfully to overlook the inverse relationship between liberty and security. We took from 9/11 a faulty lesson that others are solely responsible for our security, and that they can carry out that responsibility even within unreasonable constraints. We continue to want to have our cake and eat it, too.

“Ridiculously invasive” TSA search procedures? Don’t want to have your shoes and underwear checked? No problem. We can stop those checks tomorrow if you ask me, but remember that someone else WILL use those methods to do harm. Do you think it’s unreasonable to search infants and small children? If so, remember that small children will then be used to transport explosives. Your idea that innocent children shouldn’t be blown up is not shared by some.

Some people don’t have a “better nature” to which we can appeal. They can’t be debated, and they can’t be persuaded. “Talk softly” to them all you like; I’ll be right behind you with the “big stick.”

Last week, while my cohost, Bob DiCello and I were discussing the conviction and sentencing of the Cleveland serial killer, Anthony Sowell, Jeremiah Lee Wright had either murdered or was thinking about it in Thibodaux, Louisiana.

Wright killed. Check off that box on the “Evil Checklist.” So did Sowell. Check.

Wright killed his son. Check. Sowell killed strangers.

Wright’s son was only seven years old. Check. Sowell killed adults.

Wright’s son had cerebral palsy and other disabilities. Check. Sowell’s victims were physically sound.

Wright decapitated his son, and partially dismembered the remainder of the corpse. Check. Sowell had a head in a bucket. Check.

Wright intentionally left the head in front of his house so that the boy’s mother would find it on her return home. Check. Sowell hid his victims.

So on the checklist of evil, it seems to me that Wright has more checks.

“But Sowell killed more often,” you say?

Our judgment of murderers isn’t a judgment of quantity, or at least not solely so. Our outrage can be sparked not only by the number of victims, but by characteristics of the victim that trigger emotional responses. The innocence and physical vulnerability of Wright’s victim is the underlying cause of our outrage. Sowell’s victims cannot be said to be either innocent or physically vulnerable in the same way.

Outrage is proper in these cases, but we need to be careful to temper our tempers. The proper time for outrage is during the drafting of law, where debate blunts hostility, not in the crime’s aftermath. The fact that laws against murder even exist is an acknowledgement that crimes like this inevitably are going to occur, albeit rarely, we hope.

Sowell  is a despicable, reprehensible, contemptible, loathsome, detestable, disgusting, repugnant, repulsive, abhorrent, individual who has willfully relinquished his privilege to remain living among us. So did Wright.  They both welched on the most important provision of the contract by which we all agree to live together, and for that they should both die. For that, they need to die.

I say that not from an emotional response, but from the basis of the rules we have drafted – in the form of law – that define the lines we must not cross.

Judging the criminal after the fact, outside of Law, based on individual emotional responses, takes us one step further from being a community, and one step closer to becoming a lynch mob.

So I’m driving somewhere last week and I hear a “conservative talk show host” tell his listeners that he sleeps with his beagle every night.

Okaaay . . . .

So then he says, “Every night she pees in the bed and all over my sheets.” And then he says the bed gets “soaked.” So he washes all the sheets on his bed every morning and every day because he loves the dog so much.

Huh?

So I start thinking, What’s the deal? And he blows my mind when he tells me how he fixes the situation.

He puts the dog in diapers.

Look, I like dogs as much as the next guy – if not more.  I grew up with dogs.  But seriously. Where is the sense in holding on to an old dog that can’t control where it takes a leak? And how is that practice morally justified?

Don’t forget, in some places — here in the U.S. — little kids are homeless. Ohio ranks 20th in the nation in child homelessness. More than 20,650 of Ohio’s children experience homelessness each year according to the data collected by the McKinney-Vento Educational Programs. The money spent on doggie diapers for dying dogs could be used to help them.

Now that I think about it, I guess it’s pretty cool that these kids can at least get diapers for their dogs when they need them. Being homeless is horrible, but having a dog that pees everywhere when you’re on the street is unthinkable.

One of the host’s fans who thanked him for “hanging in there” had this to say: “Too many people have had their dogs put down because it was too inconvenient for them. [The dog] is a lucky little lady.”

Uh . . . . “Lady”? . . . . How about, “bitch”?  (It’s a dog, remember).

Besides, what sort of “lady” lays with her man and regularly spills her pee everywhere while they both sleep in it? And for that matter, what sort of man lays in his lady’s pee every day and then spends his time, water, electricity, soap, and money to wash the bedding? Are you kidding me?

If my “lady” wasn’t sick and peed the bed, she’d only be able to get away with that once. And it would have to be for a good reason, like we won so much lottery money she lost all control.  Something like that.  But if it was just because she couldn’t hold it, or didn’t want to take protective measures, I’d have to end it. To be my “lady,”  you’re gonna have to care enough about me to not pee on me. I’m sorry. But I really think that’s a non-negotiable bottom line for me.

People who put diapers on dying dogs (not the ones who are temporarily injured or recuperating from a setback)  represent what’s wrong with our society today. Fearing the pain of loss so much, they would rather wrap a dog’s butt in a diaper, instead of saying good bye to their family friend and restoring dignity and reason to their family. They also rest on the mistaken belief that putting the diaper on the dog is “good for the dog.”

Did you know, in the wild it is fairly common for the pack to kill off an elderly or sick dog? Why? Because it’s better for the pack! It prevents illness and disease from spreading – the kind of things a person gets from sleeping in dog pee.

So, just like those people who make dogs wear clothes for fun, or have them sit at the table with them (for real), dog owners who prolong the life of their old, dying dog by wrapping its back side in diapers should be prosecuted under the applicable animal abuse laws of the state in which the owner lives.

And if that sounds too harsh, think about it this way.  Any time an animal is exploited solely for our own joy, we ignore their natural value and beauty. Any time we indulge ourselves to avoid pain, we practice unhealthy coping.  And every time we treat a dog like a person or convince ourselves that they are people, we redefine the natural dynamic of life’s four legged creatures to suit our needs, not theirs. We expose them and us to injury, misunderstanding, and problems. In the end, doesn’t a dog deserve the right to be a dog?

Look, be honest about it.  Putting a dying old dog in diapers isn’t about helping the dog.  It’s all about the owner. The dog could care less. Just ask the guy who wrote “5 Reasons Why Dogs Eat Poop.”

Anthony Sowell is not evil, and he’s not an animal.

OK, let me rephrase that.

Sowell might be evil. I don’t know. In the classic biblical, God-versus-Satan sense of evil, I’m not qualified to render judgment.

On June 25, my co-host, Bob DiCello, and I were informed by a listener that we were “working for the devil.” Evil? Really? A political statement resulted in religious condemnation and eternal damnation?

That frightens me. What frightens me more is a moral and religion-based condemnation of wrongdoing – even wrongdoing by a mongrel like Sowell.

I am frightened by that because there have been moments in the past when I have been capable of great violence. I’m a policeman. People EXPECT me to carry out that violence in certain circumstances. Does that make me “evil?” Who will then sit in judgment of me? Will it be the person who thinks that Sowell should be staked out on the freeway so that the motoring public can assist in his execution?

I have no doubt that a killer lives in each one of us. If you disagree, ask yourself this question: “Is there anyone for whom I would die?” If so, there is someone for whom you would kill.

To kill in defense of another is lawful and proper, but it requires violence that is primal, animalistic, ugly, and offensive to our idea of how life “should” be.

Immoral?

Evil?

Isn’t that how we are describing Anthony Sowell? It is FEAR of that internal killer – fear of the piece of us that looks like Sowell at first blush – that brings calls for Sowell’s quick, gruesome death. It is the desire not to have a part of ourselves judged as “evil.”

Anthony Sowell’s execution does not require a judgment between “Good” and “Evil.” It requires that we enforce the line that we have drawn in the sand – in the Law – that defines the rules by which we have agreed to live.

That process has NOT been completed. It is ongoing. I believe that it’s outcome is predictable, but I could be wrong.

When it is complete, the best in us requires not outrage, but dismissal.

Thank you all for you patience.  I appreciate the opportunity to do this.  I  have set this up so we can tweak and learn.  Here is a link for sound: Question7