David McElroy

If you or I were to murder a police officer, what do you suppose the sentence would be? Death? Life without parole? 40 years? Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be a slap on the wrist.

So what happens when a police officer murders an unarmed 54-year-old Sunday school teacher and flat-out lies about what happened? If you’re Daniel Harmon-Wright, you get three years for “voluntary manslaughter.”

Why do we have one set of rules for people with badges and another set of rules for us?

Harmon-Wright was a police officer who responded to a report of a “suspicious woman” in a church parking lot in Culpeper, Va., at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning last year. The woman was actually at the church to apply for a job, and nobody has said what made her “suspicious.” Harmon-Wright claimed that he tried to reach inside the woman’s vehicle to take her license, but she suddenly rolled the window up on his arm — trapping him — and tried to drive away.

There were problems with this story, though. Most importantly, a carpenter working in sight of the confrontation said nothing of the sort happened. He said the officer had his gun in one hand and had his other hand on the woman’s door handle. When she tried to drive away, the officer fired at least six shots, killing the woman.

Pure and simple, Harmon-Wright murdered a woman who tried to drive away from him.

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Many of us have thought that Big Brother might arrive in our homes through TV sets, but what if we had the wrong appliance? What if Big Brother is really coming to control your refrigerator and oven and other very mundane appliances?

In Great Britain, the National Grid — the group that runs the power grid — has proposed that all appliances be required to have special sensors that give the power operators control to shut appliances down temporarily if they need to manage shortages of electricity. (I don’t like to link to RT.com, because it’s a propaganda organ of the Russian government, but this story appears legitimate.) The plan is also backed by power operators across the European Union, who want it adopted all over the continent.

Here in the United States, some power companies are adopting what they call “smart meters.” Who could oppose a “smart” meter? It sounds great, doesn’t it? For a power company, smart meters provide obvious benefits. They can monitor your power usage remotely, so the company no longer has to send someone to your house to read the meter. Just as important to the company, though, these meters give a power utility the ability to shut off your power remotely and “manage” your usage in other ways.

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I caught myself acting like an angry jerk the other day. I don’t like myself when that person comes out. It reminds me too much of some things I grew up with — and of things I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to escape.

It really wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few seconds. Nobody else would remember it. Few would have noticed when it happened. But it’s stayed with me since late last week, almost taunting me like something from the past that I thought was dead.

I was driving down a busy road near my house last week. I think it was Thursday afternoon, but it might have been Friday. There was a car trying to turn left out of a business, so the driver had to turn across a lane of traffic to get to another one. Instead of waiting for a time when traffic was clear in both directions — or turning right and then turning around — he instead pulled out and blocked one lane of traffic completely while he waited for the other lane to clear so he could pull out.

What he did was rude and against all traffic rules. He ended up holding up quite a number of people for 30 seconds or so, which seemed a lot longer while it was going on. But in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t in the hurry. It didn’t affect my life one bit.

But I was angry. He was violating the rules. He was cheating. He was holding me up. I blew my horn in righteous indignation.

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