Troop Deployment: Condolences to the People of Carbon County, Wyoming

Driving home from a camping trip, I was cruising through Wyoming as the Schelling Point’ed 9 MPH over when a cop car raced up on me. Turns out I had just crossed into a 75 MPH zone, 5 MPH lower than most of the highway, and I’d missed the sign with the lower limit. It had been less than 2 miles past the speed-dip.

The officer hustled over, got my documents, zipped to his car and back, dropped off a ticket for going 15 over with a quick recital of the required legalese, and raced off again. It was the most efficient ticket I had ever gotten.

Minutes later, less than two miles down the highway, I passed him again. He was doing the same thing to a UHAUL. He was farming the highway with an efficiency that would make mid-century Austrians jealous.

This is a letter of condolences to the people of Carbon County, Wyoming, where this harvest was taking place. It must be supremely embarrassing to know that the only way you can pay your bills is to leech off foreign travelers using the federal highways put down in your county. It must be humiliatingly to be reduced to modern robber-barons, scavenging $135 at a time to pay for your infrastructure and services, knowing you aren’t capable of producing enough value to fund them with your own labor.

It must be particularly embarrassing to be Officer J. Scheel, badge #130 of Dept WHP. I don’t know what you did to be punished with such degrading work, of if you just drew the short straw for this month and had to grit your teeth and plow through it. To find yourself acting the Dickensian orphan grinding on the assembly line of state theft at six tickets per hour, each hour, while your peers were likely serving their constituency, protecting their families, and tracking down dangerous criminals, must be absolutely emasculating. There’s very few people I would wish such shameful work on.

To all the rest of us, let us be thankful for what we have. If not for the grace of god, and our own dignity and self-worth, we too might be as pathetic as Carbon County, Wyoming. We place our F’s in chat for them all.

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Why is this post titled “Troop Deployment?” I’m on a podcast with a regular Random Opinion segment, called “Troop Deployments.” Figured if I’m writing them out for the podcast, I’ma double-dip and put it on my blog as well. This way there’s an easily-searchable text record as well.