One of the most profoundly puzzling pieces of American history came about in early 1942. It was the FDR executive order which allowed 140,000 Japanese Americans to be rounded up, arrested, and imprisoned for no other reason than our unfounded "fear" that maybe they might be sympathetic to the Japanese war effort rather than the US war effort. To my way of thinking, FDR single handedly destroyed every Constitutional guarantee afforded to any citizen of this country. The Japanese were illegally seized, denied due process or a speedy trial, their homes and businesses were lost, and they were falsely imprisoned. All of that would be bad enough but something even worse happened. I can find no historical record anywhere, that any individual here in America, ever filed a lawsuit on behalf of those Japanese Americans who had been stripped of their rights. You'd think somebody, somewhere, might have offered an opinion that perhaps, not only were we doing the wrong thin...

Last week I did something that many people would never do. I looked up a fellow cop that we very nearly fired, some 20 years ago. The reason I did this is because I always liked him and maybe deep down, I needed to get ok with what happened. Sometimes in life you do something for one reason expecting one outcome- and an entirely different result happens. So as we sat down last week, I never saw the slow moving emotional train wreck that was headed my way.  Mostly I think, that was a result of my bad memory and poor judgment. But then again, I have always been that way. So we sat down and talked and eventually the conversation turned to that three month time frame some twenty years earlier- a time when he was very nearly fired and ultimately resigned. Back then I had chalked the whole episode up to his immaturity and nothing else.  What I failed to do, quite honestly, was examine my own behavior and how I handled things. And as I sat there talking and listen...