Common Sense on the Rise

It seems common sense is on the rise.

This county has done the "unthinkable". It elected someone with common sense. Dar Leaf has now signed his political death warrant by exposing himself as a rational person. What could he have been thinking? He had to have been aware of the repercussions of his actions. I wonder if he just got tired of keeping his head down for so long.

Seems Dar is now at the end of his rope with the powers that be concerning contract negotiations for his troops. Who could blame him? I would not have been able to last as long as he has. It appears the county has hired an attorney supposedly skilled in negotiating labor contracts to negotiate one with the deputies in the Sheriff Department. To bad this guy only has experience negotiating with the Teamsters. His heavy handed negotiating tactics will only further erode the already low moral currently being experienced in the department and remove another reason for these good people to work hard keeping us safe.

Why on earth would anyone want to work a job like that anyways? They are verbally abused by criminals, forced to work weekends and holidays, work the night shift forever, have their already low pay be cut by reductions in hours, work short staffed, handle the human grief that we would rather not, be told by a past prosecutor that their work is for nothing, and many other painful truths that would keep a sane person from doing what they do.

So why do they keep working for us? I have known a few of them over the years and have found a few common traits among them. First I have found they carry a very deep desire to work hard and to help people. They will all hurry to the scene of an accident in the hope of saving someone severely injured or to ensure no further grief comes to the parties involved. How many of us would hurry to the scene of a domestic dispute? I know I would not. I do know that many a deputy has intervened to help an abused person escape the situation and then help them to stay safe if the abuser is unwilling to cease their actions. And how many of us would want to spend every waking moment to search for a drowning victim? Our Sheriff Department spent over a week plying the murky waters of Thornapple Lake this past summer to bring back a father and child to a grieving mother/wife while many in our community just stood idly by and spread stories of infidelity on the father’s part or claimed he kidnapped his son and left his marriage. A second common trait I have observed is a strong desire in deputies to “fix” the wrongs in life people have experienced at the hands of others. I have been thankful for this in the past when one of my children were kidnapped by an ex spouse. The deputies involved entered a known drug house and were assaulted but were finally successful in gaining the release of my daughter from her kidnappers.

I would suggest here that this very desire to help others is what Dar is currently demonstrating. Like he claims, he has been on both sides of this situation and finds the actions of the “hired gun” the county retained to be the major problem with obtaining a successful contract for all. Do we want to kill another reason our deputies have for working such a crummy job? What is the problem that our current county board has to just push this off? And why is there such an adversarial relationship between our county board and the deputies?

Let’s look into this more and fix this before it develops into something that will scar our county forever. Listen to Dar. Support the Sheriff Department now before you need their help and you wish you had.