Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 12:02 PM
Opinion
By Stephanie Ramage
SGT. SCOTT KREHER IS BACK ON THE JOB, SORT OF
The sergeant is back, but without a gun or a badge. Isn't it time Mayor Franklin forgave him? I think so. So, I wrote her the following letter this morning.
Dear Mayor Franklin,
Sgt. Scott Kreher went back to work without a gun or a badge last weekend. He’s on administrative duty—a humiliating assignment for a man who has made public safety his raison d’etre, and who has attended vigils and neighborhood gatherings to that end. The duty, I am told, will last until District Attorney Paul Howard has completed his “investigation” of Kreher’s comment about you on May 20. How long that will take is unknown.
I don’t know what there could possibly be to investigate about an 18-word sentence, and one for which Kreher offered the following apology within 24-hours of uttering it: “I wanted to express my sincere regret for the comments I made about you in our recent presentation to the City Council over the 2009/10 proposed budget on May 20th, 2009. My actions were inexcusable and certainly not what our officers and City expect from a leader in our department.”
I know it must have hurt your feelings to hear someone say that the way your administration has treated disabled police officers made him want to beat you in the head with a baseball bat. But Sgt. Kreher did apologize.
And now, he is back at work, sort of, at the precinct house, basically answering phones and filling out forms, stripped of his badge and his gun, unable to do the job he loves yet surrounded by others who are doing it. It’s got to be awkward for him, this man who has become a hero in the eyes of his fellow officers and especially in the eyes of the disabled officers for whom he took that dangerous—if badly worded—stand. Humiliating someone’s hero packs quite a wallop. It lets them know that no matter how courageous someone is on their behalf, you’re bigger, badder and more powerful.
But I would submit to you that the power one derives from forgiveness is even greater.
Mayor Franklin, considering our history, it is not easy for me to share the personal information I am about to share with you or to ask you for anything, but that is what I am doing.
I am asking you to forgive Sgt. Kreher, to call off the dogs, to withdraw your complaint from the D.A.s office, to demonstrate dignity and honor, and put the incident behind both of you. I am asking you to do this because every single day I get a phone call from some cop or some resident asking me about Sgt. Kreher, and since he went back to work badgeless and gunless last weekend I haven’t known what to write regarding his predicament.
You, Mayor Franklin, have the power to accept his apology and forgive him.
I bring it up because I forgave someone last night and if I could forgive that person, then you, I think, are capable of forgiving Sgt. Kreher.
The person who wronged me was not guilty of a small infraction. He said something so horrible to me more than two years ago that I swore I would never speak to him again.
We used to be friends. He was part of the small cadre of people in the free weight room—the “dungeon” as we call it at the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA—who talks politics, or, at least, used to talk politics. But that was before that night in 2007 when his words insulted and hurt me deeply.
The topic that night was the war in Iraq, as it so often was. And then he expanded that topic to American military operations everywhere, including Afghanistan. I’ve defended America’s service men and women quite stalwartly, and we’d had the conversation before. But that night he crossed the line.
What’s especially important to know is that my brother, a sergeant major in the Army, served in Afghanistan. He came home last year.
My brother is a career soldier. He was one of the paratroopers who jumped into Grenada in 1983, and he’s been in almost every military conflict involving American soldiers ever since. When he retired last week, he had so many awards after his name on the program that the Army had to list them in small print to make them fit on the page.
Several years ago, I bumped into one of the guys under his command and I casually asked if my brother was as much of a pain in the field as he was when we were growing up in the same house. The soldier didn’t crack a smile and said “Ma’am, I’d follow your brother into hell. I mean that. He’s a great leader.”
My family and I have joked for years about the medals that decorate the uniform that fits so neatly on his small frame and the way that you can actually hear him clinking like a jewelry store in an earthquake when he makes the rounds at family weddings and funerals.
But in the past several years, when I watched him move, under the clink of the medals I felt as if I should be hearing his very bones creak and groan. He is almost 50. The vast majority of his life has been spent in combat or preparing for combat. He’s like a piece of beat up machinery: excellent at its job, amazingly resilient, requiring little maintenance or concern, but then he’ll look at you with those Paul Newman-blue eyes and you’ll gasp a little to realize that a human being with a tender heart—the quiet artist who loved to play chess and photograph landscapes—has somehow survived hells of which he cannot speak.
I am very, very proud of him, for taking good care of the people under his command, for standing up for them, for talking back when he felt the brass was in the wrong, for putting himself in harm’s way to keep his soldiers safe and for listening to their heartaches and fears.
It tears my heart out to think how much he must have suffered over the years.
So, on that night years ago at the gym, this guy was yammering on about how American soldiers were all animals and they deserved whatever happened to them and I said, “Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about. What gives you the right to say how things should be done when you are not there, in their shoes, dealing with what they are dealing with? My brother is there, in Afghanistan.”
And he said, “Then he’s a dumbass and deserves what he gets.”
After months of flinching every time I heard the phrase “American fatalities in Afghanistan” on the news, after having, for most of my life, some family member in a combat zone, his words were like knives thrust into the pit of my stomach
I wanted to beat the guy in the head with the 10-pound weight I held but, instead, I looked him in the eye and said “I will never speak to you again.”
And for more than two years, I have kept my silence.
If I saw him, I conducted myself as if he were invisible. This was not pleasant, it often meant that an uncomfortable quiet settled on the weight room when we were both present, but I could not put his words out of my mind. The man had wished, it seemed to me, for the death of someone whom I loved dearly. I came to despise him, to hate the way that he could live with himself knowing what he had said, and how he had never apologized, despite my ongoing silence—silence that continued as the weight room grew frigid with winter and muggy with summer over and over again. My silence, I thought, should stand as a monument to my loyalty to my country, my love for my brother, and the transgressor’s seemingly unpardonable verbal cruelty.
Then last night—who knows why?—he said hello with a sad look. I hesitantly said hello back. And he said, “I want you to know that I am so very sorry for what I said. I was way out of line, it was awful of me, and I have regretted it. I don’t want to be at odds with you anymore.”
And it was as if a great weight lifted from my heart when I said “Apology accepted. I forgive you. I don’t want to be at odds anymore, either.”
Mayor Franklin, I waited for that apology for more than two years but when at last it came, I did not balk at accepting it. You waited a day, at most, for Kreher’s apology to you. It takes a big person to say he’s sorry, and it shouldn’t be discounted as nothing, even if his words hurt you deeply. They were, at the end of the day, merely words.
A new budget is upon us and a new fiscal year. It’s a good time to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. Forgiving Sgt. Kreher and withdrawing your complaint from the D.A.’s office would be a big step in that direction, but even more significantly, as your era as mayor draws to a close, do you really want this poisonous grudge tainting it?
Please be the leader you were meant to be, and accept Sgt. Kreher’s apology and call the district attorney and tell him to let it go. You said Kreher’s words were dangerous to a civil society, but Mayor Franklin, the greatest dangers to civil society are oppression of free speech and unwillingness to forgive. You can talk to my brother some time about the terrible and utterly unforgiving tolls exacted by the Taliban from Afghans who dare to speak out. Theirs is a society of stifling silence and fear of retaliation, where vengeance is nurtured and praised. We are seeing a similar sickness on the streets of Iran. Surely, you’re better than that.
If I can forgive terrible words that wounded me to the core, you can do the same, and more to the point, anything less is simply unworthy of a woman of your position and power.
--Sincerely, Stephanie Ramage