Always remember the fallen heroes in blue
Quick:
Do you remember Daniel Talbot? They do in Revere.
Do you remember John Maguire? They do in Woburn.
Do you remember Kevin Ambrose? They do in Springfield.
Do you remember Ron Tarentino? They do in Auburn.
Do you remember John DiNapoli? They do in Holyoke.
Do you remember Sean Collier? They do at MIT.
Do you remember Sgt. Sean Gannon? They do in Yarmouth.
Months from now will you remember Weymouth’s Michael Chesna, whose line-of-duty execution is receiving the kind of saturation coverage previously afforded those forenamed lawmen who, like Chesna, ended their watches when shot to death?
Do you remember Maine’s Eugene Cole, 61, the sheriff’s deputy who was gunned down three months ago? They do in the tiny hamlet of Norridgewock.
How about New Hampshire’s Jeremy Charron, the young exMarine shot to death while on a pre-dawn patrol just six weeks after becoming a cop? They do in Epsom.
At one time bloody brutality was synonymous with city life.
But urban America no longer corners the market on barbarians, which is exactly what cop-hating predators are, no matter how much that offends those who rush to “understand” them. Please. Not now, OK?
“I’m sick of being told I should ‘understand’ evil,” the late, great columnist Jim Murray wrote the day after Bobby Kennedy was killed. “Should a canary ‘understand’ a cat? A country that shrinks from punishing its criminals and locking up its mad is like an animal that disregards its senses. It’s a lamb defending the lion’s right to eat it.”
Cop-loathing is a cancer that’s metastasizing in America today, abetted by anarchists who’ve made a cottage industry out of demonizing law enforcement.
Back in 1997, a north country madman murdered two New Hampshire troopers along with two civilians in the rural town of Colebrook. One of the lawmen who pursued him through the woods was Eric Stohl, a Fish and Game lieutenant.
“Whenever we’d see something on TV about an officer being shot, I’d feel a need to write and say, ‘We’re thinking about you and we care, because we’re all in this together,’ ” Lois Stohl said that day.
“There are people who simply don’t want to live by the law. Once you put on that uniform you become a target for the craziness in this world. But now instead of hearing about it happening somewhere else it’s come to visit us.”
Quick: Do you remember Richie Halloran, or Wayne Anderson, or Tommy Rose, or Sherman Griffiths, or Roy Sergei?
They were Boston cops slain by savages.
Do you remember George Hanna or Mark Charbonnier?
They were Massachusetts state troopers shot to death.
A lot to remember? Yes. Late in his long life Simon Wiesenthal, the indefatigable Nazi hunter, was asked why he didn’t abandon the hunt and enjoy his remaining years.
“It’s a debt we the living owe to the dead,” he replied. “If we fail to remember them, it will be as if they died again.”
For Michael Chesna and all of his fallen brothers, once was heartbreaking enough.
Our gratitude is theirs eternally.