I meant to mention some of the below as part of a very organized series of blog posts about some of my recent experiences. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, my life has not been anything one could call organized recently, and thus my blog posts aren’t going to have any truly organized topical focus for awhile. Yet some of the same subjects I wanted to write about are going to get burbled about in a less cohesive fashion.
When I posted my first in a long while blogs this year I made an allusion to being incarcerated. The word choice was perhaps a little inaccurate, but the heart of the meaning was spot on. At the beginning of March, upon advice of the practical licensed counselor I was seeing for the mental anguish caused by the HR department of my then work place, which had lied, deceived, and coerced me into a situation where they fabricated multiple false claims against my actions at work to get me “terminated for cause”, the first of them directly related to a real hospitalization for an actual life-threatening infection I had contracted while working there, the counselor referred me to an advanced psychological assessment at Signature Psychiatric Hospital, the one located on the North Kansas City Hospital campus.
The person doing the assessment chose to take one word, written on a paper, not even by me, totally out of context, without even asking me to explain what it meant, even though the note was meant to remind me of something, and not meant for her to read at all, to decide to involuntarily admit me to the hospital as a potential threat to myself or others within the next 24 hours. Without explanation. After I had agreed to be admitted if they would just tell me the reason for their diagnosis, and the proposed benefit of the course of treatment. But they wouldn’t tell me anything. Instead they lied, deceived and coerced me into going into the hospital, bringing over police officers who lied to me and claimed to have an affidavit signed by a judge, which they wouldn’t let me see.
I realized there was nothing I could do. I challenged the police officers, who wouldn’t show me the paperwork, despite my right to see it. Yet if I exercised my right to leave, the police officers would simply have arrested me and committed me for resisting a police officer. There was no way I could get out. Resisting a police officer who was violating my rights would still be resisting a police officer and thus give them grounds for taking me in. If a police officer wants to arrest you, there is no right in the world you have that can stop them from doing whatever they choose for whatever reason, probable cause or not, that they have.
And 24 hours later when I saw the psych doctor he admitted the error and let me discharge myself. Since my putting the letters of my name to the admission documents, at what was effectively gunpoint, was still my self admitting myself, and not coercion, so I could discharge myself. I could have discharged myself the night before if I had know, no doubt. And thus went 24 hours of my life.
The thing that incensed me at the time was not what happened to me, but was realizing how someone could have done that even more easily to my wife, my son, or especially my daughter. How vulnerable they all are to such gross and careless cases of injustice.
And yet in the past few days I have found myself even more incensed. I always supported our boys in blue, not to mention fire men, etc., but the things I have heard recently make me realize exactly how many ways the innocent get snagged by their own good intentions into becoming criminals, even felons. One example told me is one that could very easily have been used against me within the past few months. Who knows, I might have warrants out for my arrest right now because I played the good Samaritan the same way the person who told me the following story did.
The narrator of this story to me was about 20 years old at the time when his deed of good neighborliness turned him into a felon. A neighbor he had known for a few months in a next door apartment had a prescription she couldn’t fill because she didn’t have the money. The kind young man agreed, at her request, to go down to the pharmacy and pick it up and pay the $15 for her, which he did, and brought the prescription and gave it to her. She have him her birth date to validate that he had the right to pick up the prescription for her.
She moved away a couple of weeks later, and after about a month police pulled him aside while walking on the sidewalk. They were looking for a young man in a red shirt with a hat. He had on a white shirt and no hat. But they still demanded his ID and ran his name without cause. He had 6 warrants out for his arrest with a bail amount of over half a million dollars. From the woman claiming he had stolen the prescription and that she had not authorized him to pick it up.
He spent 6 and a half months waiting for his trial, in jail, unable to for he or his family to make that bail, certain that the woman would never show up for the trial or lie about what he had done for her. Instead he got sentenced to 7 months, of which he had served all but two weeks, and became a felon for life. For doing a good deed.
And now, as he approaches 40 years old, he still has trouble getting jobs because of his felony background. From an attempt to do something nice to someone who decided that a life as a criminal for him was worth it for her to get one more refill on her opiod prescription.
The thing is, within the past 12 months, I had a friend I helped similarly, picking up a prescription for him after having let him stay with us while recovering from a 2-week stint in the VA Hospital here in KCMO for a total sepsis in his feet that almost killed him. After we insisted that he go in to get it treated in the first place. We did certain things for that friend while he stayed with us for which he agreed to pay us $600 for our care and alterations to make things livable for him while he was here, and he ran off without paying. It would be just the thing to have a police office pull me over while driving and run my name to find out I had warrants for picking up his prescriptions illegally for him. My face is on the pharmacy camera showing me picking those up for him. It would be just my word against him. Hopefully I have more social credit and connections to get out of such a perjury if he chose to do it, more credit than the once 20-year old now almost 40-year-old that I head tell of. But at one point I never thought someone would illegally imprison me in a psychiatric hospital either.
There but for the Grace of God go I has never been so real to me before. As it should be to you. As a warning what can happen no matter how innocent you think you are. Ponder and prepare.
At The Rainbow 