East Nowhere, RS

TP and I temporarily surrendered our sanity when we decided to drive all the way to HomeTown, DRS on Friday and then all the way back on Saturday. This amounted to about 24 hours of driving in 40 hours. See what I mean?

On the way back at about hour 20 of driving I got pulled over and got my first speeding ticket ever. It is expensive, it is money that I don't really have, but it was also legit. I was driving through a residential area too fast. It was one of those roads where the speed limit is 65 between towns and 30 in the towns, and the towns are the size of the head of a pin. Since my mother lives on one of those roads I can sympathize with the residents and their desire to have a quiet street. So sure, RS can have my precious dollars to pave their roads or build washed out bridges between East Nowhere and Central Nowhere. Fine.

But why, oh, why do cops have to be jerks? Are they trained especially in some kind of special asshole tactics? Of course they are, they are trained to have no respect for the people they are "protecting" to ensure "public safety". At the end of the whole experience, I was glad that all he could find to rag me on was my intelligence and powers of observation. But it seems to me that I should be able to be pulled over for a traffic infraction without driving away thanking the stars that the person that guy pulled over wasn't trans or of color. Because then, I think that all hell could have broken loose, or, rather, I have no reason to think it wouldn't. I hate that the thing that made it ok, was that I played into his idea of who the public was, of who he was out there to protect instead of criminalize. I was the nice, blonde, straight woman, who was "Real sorry, sir". I hate that he thanked me for my courtesy. Like I had options.

Is all of that really in the best interest of Public Safety? Not when my communities are part of the public.