By Paul Weiser
Let us consider a simple thing, a matter of colors, their meaning, change over time and its meaning. These colors you see every week (unfortunately), yet the final significance may leave us in tears.
Once upon a time, all emergency vehicles - fire, police and ambulance - had red flashing lights. Today, all use white strobes but police have blue flashers while fire/rescue have red. It may be a southern thing (in the South, blue came earlier) but this only reinforces the significance.
Once there were only emergency vehicles (red lights); then one class of such vehicles went blue. The class which changed (earlier in the South) was those empowered to employ violence and coerce, not that which saved life and property. Once, red flashers meant, "get out of the way because you should;" today, red means, "get out of the way so I can help someone" while blue means, "get out of my way so I can get after someone, or I'll get after you."
Like police in the South, northern police found - once they had to deal with transplanted Southerners - that they needed to make their threat specific: trash (black and white) throw rocks at firemen, blue lights say they'll shoot back. The great tragedy is that this happened in formerly civilized parts; the deeper tragedy is which way the change went.
The police changed. Whatever their excuse, they (like southern police before them) removed themselves from the helping class (fire and medical). It is a nihilistic choice, falling in with the doctrine that maintaining law and order is not helping people like saving their lives and putting out fires, that its only justification is power. The lights are bright, and when they flash blue rather than red they make us weep, philosophically, at the implied moral falsehood.
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