Dan Patrick

Dan Patrick: Thank A Cop,
Or Else

by

Above: Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick says he wants Texans to call cops "sir" or "ma'am" at all times.

Ho there, good citizen! Have you thanked a cop today?

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick wants to know. Because, you see, the United States of America is trembling on the verge of “total lawlessness” and if you don’t buy that nice officer over there an ice cream cone, well, the very fabric of our tenuous social contract may unravel before your ungrateful eyes.

And we wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we, good citizen? No, we most assuredly would not want your failure to be anything but entirely subservient to our nation’s downtrodden and disrespected law enforcement professionals to result in the inevitable and wholesale degradation of everything America holds dear! We would not want that at all.

Luckily, our gracious patriarch Dan Patrick has issued some suggestions as to how we can appease our public servants, the lot of which are cruelly being forced, day after day, to pay for their enchiladas verde — all because of your bad attitude, citizen:

Join me in changing this negative attitude toward those that protect us, by practicing the following:

  • Start calling our officers sir and ma’am all of the time. It’s a show of respect they deserve.
  • Every time you see an officer anywhere, let them know you appreciate their service to our community and you stand with them.
  • If you are financially able, when you see them in a restaurant on duty pick up their lunch check, send over a dessert, or simply stop by their table briefly and say thank you for their service.
  • Put their charities on your giving list.
  • If your local law enforcement has volunteer-citizen job opportunities, sign up.

If Patrick’s helpful little checklist here seems like a bizarrely facile response to a non-problem that relies on a disturbing mix of abject compliance and unquestioning loyalty to every last member of an incredibly diverse profession under any and all circumstances, you’re probably part of the non-problem, you churlish wretch.

Heck, you probably think there’s something fishy about the leader of Texas’ small-government tea party movement finger-wagging his constituency into blind obedience to… the government. You probably even think this whole thing is mostly predicated on Dan Patrick’s inability to stop pandering to a frothing electorate who are invested in nothing so much as their own white supremacy. For shame, citizen! This is about freedom. And possibly donuts. Freedom donuts. For cops.

After all, it’s not like the leader of the free world recently signed into law a “Blue Alert” program meant to protect cops, or telephoned the widow of murdered Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth to celebrate the “uncommon bravery” of police officers and decry Goforth’s killing as an “affront to civilized society.”

And so what if police support rallies have been drawing huge crowds for nearly a year? Surely it is of little significance that nigh on 3,000 people in Austin alone have said they’ll attend a “Police Lives Matter” march downtown later this month. That’s only 1,000 more people saying they plan to spend an entire morning marching through public streets screaming their thanks to law enforcement officers than have so much as clicked the “like” button on Austin’s Black Lives Matter community Facebook page.

Can’t we all just get along — like, say, these two officers, who you probably never heard of after their “His life matters” photo tore across the Internet in an inescapable viral wave of feel-good colorblindness?

But hey, there’s a cop out there who might just feel so “underappreciated” that she looks the other way the next time Pilfer McPurloin helps himself to your wallet. And you, citizen, will only have yourself to blame.

Better be on the safe side. Better thank a cop. They take cards, apparently.