About the Author
The world is a dumpster fire, and I am pretending to be a firefighter.
A forty-year-old Floridian. A career cop, lately in a leadership role. Raised Republican, still common-sense. Beholden to no party — only to the obvious thing said out loud.
I'm a forty-year-old man in Florida, and I've always paid attention to politics. Lately, though, I pay attention the way you'd watch a grease fire on the stove — closely, and with a growing certainty that somebody had better do something. Somewhere in the last few years, the country lost its mind. Not the whole world, exactly. America. Specifically, spectacularly, America.
I lay a good deal of that at the feet of a party that still calls itself conservative but hasn't conserved a single thing I can remember — not our institutions, not our norms, not the climate, not even the quaint idea that facts are facts and words are supposed to mean something. "Conservative" used to be a description. Lately it's mostly a volume setting.
Here's the part that throws people: I was raised in it. Republican home, Christian home, the whole set of values that comes standard with the package. And the strange thing is, those values never actually left me. If anything they got stronger. Decency. Honesty. Responsibility. Looking out for the person standing next to you. My beliefs have changed plenty over the years; the values underneath them didn't. I just stopped finding them in the party that claims to hold the patent.
I cast my first Democratic ballot in college. Nobody converted me — I just kept getting educated and kept getting out into the world, and the two have a way of burning off the fog. A whole lot of what I'd been handed growing up simply didn't survive contact with reality.
I took the scenic route to get here. I've played in a rock band. I've sold wine. I rented out movies at a Blockbuster, back when that sentence still made sense. I taught for a stretch. And then I went into law enforcement, where I've spent most of my working life and, these days, found my way into a leadership role — one I'd rather try to be worthy of than brag about.
That last part comes with a particular kind of loneliness. Policing is not exactly wall-to-wall with people who see the world the way I do; most of the room sits on the other side of the aisle from me. So I've made it my quiet job to be the guy who says the common-sense thing out loud anyway. I don't go hunting for the political fight — but I have never once turned one down.
One day I'd like to be in a position to actually fix some of this, instead of narrating it from the cheap seats. I'm not there yet. Until then, I serve where I can — and I write here.
For the record, I don't belong to anybody's team. I'm conservative about some things, frankly socialist about others, and flat-out progressive about a few more, and none of that feels like a contradiction to me. It feels like having a stable, common-sense read on how the world ought to work, and refusing to fake the rest just to match a jersey.
My whole philosophy fits on a cocktail napkin: nobody gets to tell anybody else how to live — with one honest exception. If the way you're living genuinely harms how someone else gets to live, then we should talk. "It hurt my feelings" is not the same thing as "it harmed my life," and we have badly, expensively confused the two.
People could stand to take things a little less seriously. But they could also stand to remember that "woke" was never the slur it got twisted into — it just means you're awake. Paying attention. Not asleep at the wheel while the car drifts into the ditch. Live and let live doesn't mean every boundary vanishes; it means the only boundary that truly counts is real harm — not bruised feelings, not wounded pride. The goal was never to win the argument. The goal was for things to be fair. That's the whole sermon.
So that's me — and this is Ink & Steel: the pen against the noise, one snarky, sourced post at a time. If common sense really is going extinct, the least I can do is keep a record that somebody, somewhere, kept saying it out loud.