On the Fence

I've been thinking of my brethren in public safety in the USA lately, my firefighter brothers and sisters, and, by extension of the brotherhood, those in law enforcement.

This is for those who are on the fence or within a decade of retirement. This is a little shove to get you off that fence and on a new adventure. Life is a limited resource and your own personal allotment diminishes by the day. And the reality is none of us gets to pick the end point without a willful action to do so.

Those of us who fought long and hard for our benefits, specifically our retirement benefits if still working, are seeing those benefits being significantly eroded and bargained away by those whose memories may not be as long or who don't have enough time on the job to really know and understand the history of these benefits and the struggles for them or who just need immediate dollars to sustain lifestyles that are not sustainable any longer.

In my mind they are not seeing the bigger picture or the endgame. This is a sad state of affairs but it is the reality of the public servant now.

The bigger picture for those in public safety is that exposures to things that can kill you, short or long-term, give you PTSD, damage your body permanently or just plain wear you down as you age are the real reasons that retiring as soon as you can isn't just important, it is critical to living as long as you can and as healthy as you can.

You are not in a job for lightweights. You are exposed to physical altercations, guns, knives, homemade explosives, disease laden bodily fluids, the craziest and most obese people on earth covered in god knows what and things that are only limited by people’s imaginations, of which we all know that there are no limits.

There is not a single one of us that have spent any time in public safety that does not have exposures to carcinogenic materials, physical use and abuse that is not normal and the psychological effects of exposure to chronic death and trauma and the abnormal sleep patterns that the preceding exposures promote and, let alone, our crazy work schedules.
It is not physically normal or healthy to have a work schedule that keeps you at work and on alert for days on end or with your hours rotating throughout a 24 hour period over the course of career.

These exposures take a toll on you, your loved ones if you have any left after being twisted by a career that hardens you mentally and spiritually that really doesn't become truly apparent until you retire. 

You can feel this towards the end of your career when things just don’t seem to matter as much to you but you won’t really acknowledge it until you are out the door.

I was no wallflower, stand in the background emergency operations firefighter. I was a worker and I worked elbows deep whenever I could.  But I also knew that my heart wasn't in it anymore. I had participated in enough human misery, a never ending social drama and enough of what seemed to me more and more pointless fire suppression and risk taking by managers who did not really fully understand or assess risk versus gain. I also knew that I had a very decent retirement option available to me at the age when firefighters bodies and minds really begin to suffer from the job.

We can talk about statistics all day long. How, after the age of fifty, for every year you work your lifespan is shortened or your incidence of significant injury increases. That is just common sense! Heart attacks, cancer, blown out backs, exhaustion, it’s all a reality.

I will tell you this as a certainty. You are going to have dreams about your career. Not the super pretty, feel good dreams……. These dreams will wrench you right out of your sleep. Your mind will finally let you process the horrific events you have dealt with over the course of a career. However your constitution is comprised will determine how long these last and how they affect you.

Personally speaking my dreams have abated significantly but they do come on occasion still. I do contemplate my mortality in a very serious fashion every day. I also contemplate the mortality of people I love on a daily basis and how my death and their deaths will affect each of us. It’s a serious reality and those of us in public safety should know this better than anyone.

You have options and I highly recommend you take them. Why in the hell did we fight so hard for them and argue all those very things listed above and cite all the statistics to prove them if we choose not to utilize them? We paid for those benefits out of our wages! Do not waste them!

Is it fear?  Fear of leaving the routine and discipline of what you know? Fear of being with people for all those hours that you used to spend at work?

Or, fear of just not being that guy or gal anymore…. In a world that is different and comfortable to you where you have a level of prestige that won’t be there when you retire.
Everybody has their own set of fears and everybody can rationalize them.

At the end of my career my fear was a bit akin to taking a walk off a cliff. As long as I stayed where I knew exactly what was in store for me for as long as I chose it to be I had a predictable outcome that was set in stone and I could ride that until I just wore out.

I also knew that to stay would be the easiest thing to do but also the least rewarding. That to stay at a job I was good at, that I could do in my sleep, be looked at positively by society and to help people, at least in theory, was very attractive.

To me, though, that was a lie. That meant acquiescing to the fear of a real life outside of my total and controlled comfort zone.

Well, anyone who knows me knows that is not my path.

I can only encourage all of you on the fence or getting close to really search your hearts for your passion, your love and your dreams and to pull out all the stops.