The bouncer and the melancholic lawmaker

A YouTuber named Sean Reyes, known as the Long Island Auditor, has over 1 million subscribers. His shtick is being bounced from public buildings.

His underlying motives may be different from those he claims, but that doesn't matter, because his mischief is in the public interest. Maybe he craves attention like most doctors crave a comfortable living.

As long as the goal is worthy, what drives it is irrelevant.

Many of history's greatest figures made their marks as nuisances. It can be an honorable calling.

Last June, Reyes was arrested at the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association headquarters, where he had shown up to publicize the union's defense of police officers who, having admitted to wrongdoing that might have resulted in forfeiture of their pension, are allowed to escape that penalty by staying on payroll while accruing full benefits and achieving full pension eligibility.

It's a fiscal bullet-proof vest.

We're not talking about standard professional courtesies for which the rest of us would be punished, such as running lights, and making illegal turns. Among actual instances of cops qualifying for this phenomenal perk are cases of wire fraud, exposure of the identity of an undercover officer, and punching a handcuffed prisoner.

The SCPBA president accused Reyes of a "campaign of harassment," claimed he has been subjected to death threats and demanded an investigation by the state legislature. Reyes insisted that his arrest was an "act of tyranny," and that he was simply exercising his First Amendment rights.

He called the union the "Police Malevolent Association." A little wordplay for comic relief.

The pension protection artifice is unique. But it's not straightforward chicanery. It's more complicated than that. The reality of law enforcement work justifies departure from normal practice, though herculean care must be taken to assure that it is not abused.

In recent years more than ever, police officers are the subjects of either knee-jerk homage or hostility, often in the absence of cause for either. They are pawns in the culture wars.

Police devotees believe that cops are on a sacred mission as guarantors against chaos and can do no wrong, even when evidence suggests that tragic consequences of their actions were not attributable to human error or the extreme pressure of making instantaneous life and death decisions.

They don't flinch at giving cops the benefit of the doubt, instead viewing it as a patriotic duty to exempt them from the possibility of doubt all together. They are looked up to as superhuman, except when they may be implicated in potential wrongdoing. Then the acknowledgment that "they're only human" is their nearest thing to an assignment of accountability.

On the other hand, police officers are among the primary targets of emergent radicals whose collectivist outrage and convergent energies have selected them as the symbols of society's degradation.

Cops too have been victims of injustice's reigns of terror. Taunting and bloodying them has become a central plank in protesters' playbook.

Rioters, as a well-regulated militia, have become part of the gig economy.

Causing injuries to cops are feathers in the cap and notches on the belt of some people. They will stage incidents to provoke cops into responding in kind to restrain violence and neutralize threats to themselves or others.

As the conflict unfolds, companions of the instigators will film and redact context, in effect tampering with evidence. This creates a visual that appears to incriminate cops.

Scapegoating cops is not an affirmation of the principles of social justice, though often cynically misrepresented as such.

In the current climate, if you have a kind word for a cop, or if after all the facts are in following an exhaustive review of their actions during a demonstration, protest, or insurrection, you accept their exoneration, the unvarnished evidence itself may be viewed by sundry demagogues as dog whistles of fascism and other repressive "isms."

This has affected the reliability of jury selection science and pools.

The SCPBA is justified in refusing to let its members be collateral damage in a revolutionary struggle. Cops are particularly prone to "slip and fall"-like scams, in which injury is feigned for purposes of litigation.

They are no more or less entitled to the presumption of innocence than are civilians, and it is not only their union's fiduciary responsibility, but the dictation of the rule of law, to uphold this core value. But when alleged malfeasance has been verified by irrefutable evidence that is not interpretative but speaks for itself, and there has been no abrogation or compromise of due process, and especially upon cops' voluntary admission, they must be disciplined.

Their badge is not like a lead apron to shield them from the laws' irradiation.

Sean Reyes may be a sensation-seeking grandstanding showman. But even if he confronted the SCPBA as a prank, his audacity was an ingenious act of civic duty, even though nothing will come of it.

However much has already come, in terms of bi-partisan respect, of Congressmember Tom Kean Jr.'s (R-NJ) public sharing of the raw and highly private reason that he withdrew from the public eye, missed 139 missed roll calls and put his re-election campaign in suspended animation for four months.

Kean, who is a moderate Republican with a voting record suggestive of a capacity for good-faith dialogue on some issues, was hospitalized for severe and disabling depression.

Depression, like autism and ADHD and some other conditions, has perhaps been over-diagnosed, minimized and to an extent politicized. But it is a torturer and a killer.

Kean's confiding his inner turmoil to the nation was a confession of the soul that took precedence over political calculation. It may cost him an election.

Something similar happened before.

Thomas Eagleton was a U.S. Senator (D-MI) from 1968-1987.

He also was the candidate for Vice-President on George McGovern's ticket in 1972. He had kept secret his multiple hospitalizations for depression, but after news reports revealed that this history, he withdrew from the presidential race upon the request of McGovern, who had shortly before sworn that he backed Eagleton "1000 percent."

Tom Kean Jr.'s heroic candor got a mixed reception among his peers. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) called it "ridiculous," saying "Life is depressing. Life is hard. Get to work." Some other legislators were less callously imbecilic, pointing out that Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) had been hospitalized for depression also, but kept the public informed of his ordeal almost from the beginning.

Other colleagues mitigated their praise of Keane by noting a lack of correspondence between his professed sensitivity to mental health issues, and his voting record in that area. As noted in Mother Jones Magazine: "during his two decades in the New Jersey Senate, Kean consistently opposed paid sick leave for his constituents. He voted against New Jersey's historic Earned Sick Leave Act, which mandates 5 paid sick leave days per year for New Jersey workers. He also voted against new Jersey's No Surprise Medical Bills Act."

Additionally, he voted against "a bill requiring suicide and mental health screening of juveniles in county detention centers... and against legislation that established Get Covered N.J., the state's Affordable Care Act marketplace," observed Gothamist.

Perhaps his agonizing journey has, like a religious epiphany, converted Keane to a more fervent sympathy for human suffering.

It takes so little to humble a person by chance of nature, sometimes shaming them in the process. Fate has many ways of bursting the bubbles of hubris and complacency.

A blood vessel or clot gone awry, an electrolyte imbalance, some briefly oxygen-deprived tissue, can reduce the most brilliant theoretical physicist to the state of a dependent infant. Blood chemistry can make a maniac out of a saint.

Awareness of our vulnerability should make us better people. Regardless of our elective affinities and party loyalties.

