Thrasymachus blog post

Just do the right thing.

I was an MP in West Germany from '84 - '87, and I pulled my partner (who was a Spec 4) off a guy he was beating the shit out of on my first night (when I was an 18 year old PV2) of road duty. I did it in the heat of the moment without thinking about it. About a week later I yelled at one of my Sergeants "That's enough!" in a similar situation, where there was a bar fight and they turned on us, but he had won and had the guy cuffed and was still hurting him, and he stopped when I yelled (they started calling me Command Private Major Monk). But pretty quick the ethos changed and our unit lost its reputation for brutality, and it got to where in most situations, the riled up drunk soldiers would just listen to us rather than try to fight us....Listen, people know how to do the right thing. Anywhere you are, if you see bullshit and abuse, make it stop or at least say something. Conformity isn't human nature, and don't use that excuse to not do the right thing. I'll tell you something else that's true, my dad was a piece of shit, and I learned this standing up to him and getting hit for it. We are all born with it. Just do the right thing and let people conform to that; you know what it is and how to do it. That's your human nature, that and the ability to ignore it and live in an unjust world if you choose to.