This is the time of year to give thanks for all our blessings and make plans for the New Year. As I write this column my grandson, Devon, is sitting a few feet away playing a computer game. He is a happy young man of 9 years. He is attending a public fine-arts grade school with small classes and very devoted teachers. He lives in a nice home in a good neighborhood. His Dad, my son-in-law, is a wonderful man. He is kind, gentle, gainfully employed, and everything a father-in-law could ever wish for. Until his year-old daughter, Alora, gets married he will never know how thankful I am that he found my daughter. My wife is working as an RN in a county clinic that services a primarily Hispanic and illegal alien clientele. Many of her patients come to the U.S. because they have disease processes that they cannot get treated for in their own country due to the cost or in some cases just a lack of available services. My wife loves working as a nurse; a career she started only 4 years ago. I am grateful that there will be healthier children as a result of our country's policies toward everyone. So life is good, today.
We are your basic white middle class couple and it was only a few years ago that my daughter was a single mom with a mixed-race child. My cop cynicism saw only a lonely future and hard days ahead for her. But it was a cynicism born out of my experience with the world of policing and I should have trusted that everything would work out. She is smart, like her mother, and that mistake may have changed her world, but it didn't change the person she was. She is a wonderful Mom and my grandchildren are the love of my life.
It was only a little over a year ago that my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. It was a dark time for both of us and once again I let my cynicism get the best of me as I envisioned only worst case scenarios for months after the surgery. Chemo wasn't an option because of some other medical complications (a mixed blessing) so she went with the one therapy available to her. Her odds are only very slightly worse than if she had undergone chemo, but at the time it seemed like a big deal.
As we entered the Christmas Season I stopped to think about what was important to me and, as always, my wife wanted to know what my New Year's resolutions would be. I didn't have any at the time but as I thought about the last few years I decided that the first thing I was going to do was try to eliminate the cynicism that comes from years of seeing only the worst in people and planning for worst case scenarios. I started by remembering how very lucky I am to have such a wonderful son-in-law and two beautiful grandchildren. I know that my wife and I are extremely lucky to have found her tumor when we did since it had not been picked up on her last mammogram. I am grateful that we live in a country that doesn't measure a person's eligibility for medical care by the color of their skin or their immigration status and I am grateful that we provide the prenatal care necessary for the health expectant mothers.
My cynicism for the whole issue of illegal immigration is now reserved for our professional politicians and their political power plays that do nothing to solve the problem.
Enough rambling...
Cynicism is understandable when you've worked the streets for any length of time, but it is also counterproductive. It's easy to see the problems and list all the negative fallout that will result. The thing is, most of the time we don't experience the worst case scenario. Most of the time things work out okay. Crime rates are an example. A few years ago when every criminologist in the world was predicting a crime wave of immeasurable proportions we prepared for the worst, and it didn't happen. In fact, crime went down. Nobody seems to know why. It just did.
We prepare, or at least we should prepare, for a worst case scenario every time we make a high-risk entry or respond to a domestic call. In most cases we are over-prepared, and that's okay in terms of officer survival but it also contributes to our cynicism.
Physically we prepare ourselves for the confrontation that we know will occur. We work out hard; we try to reach our pain threshold in training so we can tolerate it when we are challenged on the street. Yet, we are only involved in physical confrontations about 2% of the time. Most of those are minor uses of force. In spite of that, the idea is still in our head that we need to be ready for the worst and unless we are careful that's how we end up viewing the world. In preparing for the worst we lose sight of the best things that are coming our way. We forget how to prepare ourselves to see the good in what's happening around us and in that idea I found a reason for my New Year's resolution.
We live in a cynical world. We are in a cynical profession; maybe the most cynical of professions. But in our profession we also have the opportunity to make it a brighter and better world for those around us, and by doing that we can brighten our own world. My New Year's resolution is to engage in one act of unexpected kindness every day. Maybe we can't change the world, but we can change moments in time, and that may be what's more important.
