Just Crossin' All the "I's" and Dottin' All the "T's"...

Folks reading this who are located back East, North, or, West in the Golden State, would not believe this place. Remote and craggily beautiful with spots of culture, no other location on earth can compare.

However, we do have our difficulties; I don’t believe that a secret the magnitude of the NCFE bankruptcy and the loss of Medicaid funding could have been kept anywhere else in this nation.

Crime and punishment are kind of wishy-washy around these parts – especially, in some cases, the punishment part. Examples: Four people were in a trailer house just down the road, drinking and doing drugs, and things started getting out of hand. One person acted as executioner and shot another in the back of the head, then burned down the house; the body was found in the rubble. The executioner ran away but was extradited six weeks later from another state. Although he was held in jail for three months, the Grand Jury refused to indict, and he was released. The everyone-look-stupid-now-and-swallow- this-one “reason:” The witnesses (the other two people in the house that night) were drinking, thereby rendering them “unreliable.”

Another scenario: A thirteen-year old girl was playing harmless pranks after dark with neighborhood children. She knocked on a window, and then took off running and giggling.

The occupant of the house chased her down in a pickup truck and shot her in the back. No, he was not arrested. The Grand Jury refused to indict. The entire town of Willcox was outraged, but their rage, like all rage against the machine out here, is confined, and finally dissipates, inside the state borders. The state won’t do anything, and nobody outside the state will listen.

I seem to remember when kids got grounded for stunts like that…not chased down and shot…

Scenarios go on and on, but then, that’s another book, isn’t it? The purpose for writing this particular segment (which has nothing to do with the NCFE bankruptcy and the horrible ways our elders live and die) is this: I don’t know if it’s true, but local legend has it that someplace in Southeastern Arizona, a husband and wife were involved in Constitutional Rights and wondering why Constitutional Rights are so scarce out here. They were protesting pretty loudly about it, trying to draw national attention from national authorities.

It seems that their remote house was battering-rammed in the middle of a moonless night by a team dressed in black, who injected the male and the female victims with methamphetimines, then shot them with AK-47s; their cocker spaniel and blue heeler were shot, too. Only the cat escaped through a pet door in the wall.

Some packaged illegal drugs were thrown about in the rubble, and guns were placed in the lifeless hands of the couple. “Drug Bust. Resisting Arrest. It’s All Good.”

Just in case this is not a legend, I need all the Powers That Be to know that I do not now, and have never, used illegal drugs, nor bought and sold them, nor manufactured them.
Hair samples, complete with follicles, are in safe places around the country (none are in Arizona), complete with witnessed, notarized statements from those who pulled the hair from my head.

I believe this to be necessary since I am spilling things out into the internet that were never meant to leave highly guarded closets.

But...like I said...it’s probably just a legend...

Perhaps someday we will have statehood for Arizona, giving us someone to appeal to, and giving them someone to answer to.