I felt much the same way when I opened my Chronicle Herald one morning and discovered that my high school classmate Bev (MacDonald) Busson was now the toughest mountie of the bunch : Commissioner, top alpha dog. The first ever female head of the RCMP.
Bev MacDonald was in my class at DARTMOUTH HIGH for a couple of years, we weren’t particularly distant or particularly close, but sometimes by hap stance we would be walking the long three km route to home together (we lived in the same general direction).
(Our regular path passed by what was to be Wortman's denturist business, by the way.)
From those rare extended private conversations I got the distinct impression that in some ways, Bev was a lot more naive and more gentle than what her always bubbly but gentle manner in school had indicated.
So I was a fair bit surprised when we chanced to met a few years later near the Lakefront Apartments and she mentioned she was planning to try and join the RCMP : ‘ because I have some native’ was all she explained.
Decades flew by and I forgot that conversation and Bev until that morning when I discovered that Bev had indeed joined the RCMP and rose and rose and rose - dealing with some very brutal assignments like BC’s violent drug trade - right to the very top.
Clearly one tough smart cookie.
Most of the time, the RCMP’s internal culture clearly works : it molds super cops out of ordinary Josephines and Joes.
But it can have its limits.
One can go too far into drinking one’s own Kool-Aid and believing one’s own puff press releases.
There are simply times when one is more useful, more efficient, more beneficial to society, when one quickly, openly and fully admits making mistakes.
No one is always “the-smartest-cops-in-the-room” or “the master-cops-of-the-Universe”.
And I hope Senator Bev MacDonald Busson would agree.....
No comments:
Post a Comment