" Park Rangers are like cops. ...
How so?
#22 | POSTED BY LAMPLIGHTER "
Well, I have worked for about four years in both Yellowstone NP and Yosemite NP and have talked with a lot of rangers. One old retired Ranger in Yellowstone told me he quit, "because they were turning us into the police." He told me this as he felt that as a representative of the National Park Service he believed that "having mass crowd control drills with hundreds of Rangers screaming and stomping forwards scaring the people they were supposed to help safely navigate the giant parks did not fit into his idea of what a Ranger is supposed to represent." Also, he went on to say that, "harassing people for doing anything not within the rule book with no real ability to make a decision on the spot ruined their sense of autonomy and made them look and feel like fascists." Forcing Rangers to cite people with tacky-tacky citations was a way to make revenue for the goverment and did not fit into the character of what a Ranger was supposed to historically be in relation to the visitors and so this Ranger of some 30 years had retired before he really had planned on doing so. Rangers did not even carry pistols on their belts until 'after' the giant beatdown that they, the California Highway Patrol and the local country Sheriff put on a mass of young people and bikers in the Yosemite Valley in the early 70's when the place was turning into some sort of drug party zone. In my time in Yosemite, I met a Latino dish washer that picked me up hitchhiking after my truck broke down along the Merced River and he told me that the park Rangers constantly pull him over and search his car while on his way to his job at a big hotel inside Yosemite NP. I could go on and on but believe me that while these Rangers have changed for the better, with addition of female Rangers and minority folks into the job but at the same time the job has also evolved into one where they no longer play the helpful smiling Ranger and instead have become intimidating ----- that bully people. Not that some people do not deserve to be bullied or that all the Rangers are bad bullies but we wish they would save that stuff for the tourons and not everyone else they come into contact with. In Yellowstone, the local Park Service workers refer to the Rangers as the "enemy" as they feel they treat them worse than the tourist and I can attest to this as my wife and I got a double ticket for each of us for parking in a dirt spot that on the other side of the park is legal yet they claimed it was not on legal on "their" side of the park. They even had one young Ranger standing back with his knees bent and his hand on his gun as if my 5'1" wife was going to draw down on them at any moment. They are law enforcement and no longer the humors story tellers of old days.
This is the feel good story of the week. Come on Ukraine, lay waste to those North Korean cannon fodder and to terminate as many Russians and Chinese in the process at the same time. Slava Ukraine!