I just discovered something. Driving home from the store, I saw another huge pickup with the "Thin Blue Line" flag on the front bumper. I'm already frustrated with the exclusionary mindset that this encourages putting the lives of police officers over the lives of people in other dangerous professions. I'm all for supporting the police. It's a dangerous and necessary job. My father and grandfather were both police officers. But this got me thinking about my profession as a rigger and by extension, tower climbers. These are the guys that climb those towers hundreds of feet to make sure your cell phones work. So I looked up the number of officer deaths in 2022. The total comes to 245 including heart attacks and heat stroke. Then I looked up tower climber deaths for the same year; just 3. BUT, if you look at the number of police officers in the US, roughly 660,000, versus the number of tower climbers, less than 10,000, then the percentage for both comes to about 0.03%. I guess all I'm really getting at is that the United States flag already includes ALL of us, so please stop changing it to fit your agenda or to put one life above another.
And the next time you're reading about another officer being injured or killed in the line of duty, remember the men and women that make it possible for you to read that news on your cell phone.