Meth, murder making rural areas unsafe
The following comes from Marion County Sheriff Lee Becker, by way of Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Larry Welch. Welch, sending out the message last Dec. 16, said he got it from the Dec. 8, 2002, New York Times.
"Drugs and crime are unraveling rural America. Crime, fueled by a meth epidemic that has turned fertilizer into a drug-lab component and given some sparsely-populated counties higher murder rates than New York City, has so strained small-town police budgets that many are begging the federal government for help.
"The rate of serious crime in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Iowa is as much as 50-percent higher than in the states of New York (and New Jersey), the FBI reported in October. Towns of 10,000 and 25,000 people are now the most likely places to experience a bank robbery.
"Drug-related homicides fell by 50 percent in urban areas, but they tripled over the last decade in the countryside. We have seen drug crime in places that never used to have it.
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"Seventy-three percent of Kansas law-enforcement agencies have 10 or fewer full-time officers. And an incredible 49 percent have five or fewer — primarily municipal and county agencies."
Deana Olsen says she's amazed at the number of new cars that are not, it seems, equipped with turn signals! Even old farm trucks have them, she says, but not the new cars!
Another pet peeve of hers is disrespect of the American flag. Flags on the ground, falling over or already fallen. Flags laying in people's yards. Flying in inclement weather.
If a flag touches the ground, it is supposed to be destroyed by burning, she said. And if displayed at night, proper flag etiquette requires that it be lighted.
One more, this one back in the traffic area — motorists who turn, particularly from Main south onto Third Street, in a curving, arc pattern.
"A corner is a corner, not a curve," Olsen said Friday. "Angles are not curves. People start their turns too soon."
We all know the old saw about a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. And a curved trajectory is, no doubt, shorter than a turn made at a 90-degree angle.
But who's in that big a hurry? It's easier, less "work," to make the turn in an arc, not at a right angle, but it also could be more unsafe, as in, you might take a chunk off a car stopped on Third at Main, pointed north.
— JERRY BUXTON
