heroes

Free Your Mind

Jay Irvin courage, growth, hero worship, mindfulness, opinion, oregon, police, psychology, Uncategorized , , , ,

GeorgeCarlin

I’ve really enjoyed George Carlin.

I just finished reading his self-described “sortabiography” (Last Words).  George started writing it years ago and his agent/manager finished it for him after his death.

Just like in his comedy show, George doesn’t pull punches.  He writes about his pain and path.

George was a daily pot smoker (no surprise there), a heavy cocaine user, and a functioning alcoholic.  What really disappointed me was Carlin credits his success to his use of LSD. He relates that LSD opened his mind to be more creative and lose the “bullshit” of his upbringing.

Carlin was raised to be hyper-Catholic in a dysfunctional family with an abusive alcoholic father and a manipulative-overbearing mother.  Mom eventually left pops and then poverty became an issue.  George, for the most part, was left to raise himself.  Unfortunately this is not an uncommon tale.

George left home to join the US Air Force at 17.  His plan was to become a radio personality, a comic, get famous, make movies, and then ‘have it made’.  What George didn’t know is that leaving home is only a geographic solution.  While you can move 1,000’s of miles away from home, your ideas of home/family still move with you.  Psych docs call it ‘family of origin issues’.

Trouble followed George and, as can be expected, the military was not a good fit for someone railing against authority.  His Air Force career was cut short and he started his broadcasting career.

George masked his pain and issues by self-medicating.  There was the liquor and pot.  And in the later 60’s he found hallucinogens.

I identified with George up to that point.  I had serious ‘family of origin’ issues.  My mom was a hyper-religious, manipulative over-bearing sort.  My dad was emotionally absent and was not a good man.  We were way below poverty standards.  I escaped to the military.  I left the Air Force prematurely. But I didn’t choose hallucinogens to “free” myself.

I’ve never used LSD or peyote or mescaline.  I’ve never licked a frog to get high.  I’ve never tried cocaine or heroin.  I’ve never even smoked pot (gasp). I don’t understand ‘huffers’.  I drink very little alcohol now.   I did drink too much in my 20’s and 30’s.  But experimenting with drugs is completely foreign to me.

Yet I did find ways to have the success I wanted without drugs.  And I’m still working to achieve additional goals– chemical free.

I have studied the human mind. I have studied how to and have experienced an alternate consciousness via meditation/hypnosis/yoga.  I don’t know if it’s like an LSD high, but it’s close enough for me. My first out of body experience came in 1987 flying back to the US from Spain in the webbing flight seats of a C-141.  There was just enough engine noise and I was just woozy enough to experience this altered state.  It was eye-opening.

I’ve been able to re-create the out of body experience several times and never with drugs.  It’s like any exercise… the more you practice… the better you get.

ALANCohen
Alan Cohen

Years ago I went to a class Alan Cohen taught.  Alan’s course was how to live truer to one’s values…. How to be more authentic….  I’d read and enjoyed Alan’s books…. I liked the way he wrote.  Alan inspired me.  I asked him what the secret to his mind-expansion was… he said “LSD”.  Another potential ‘hero’ down in flames….

But maybe that’s why I’m a good cop. I’m very ‘straight’.   I don’t relish the idea of self-medicating and I don’t wanna ‘get bombed outta my gourd’.  Maybe I’m a self-control freak?

I’ve realized I can learn from anybody.  Even from those I don’t care to emulate.  And I’ve learned I can be happy and create emotional freedom without medication…. perhaps that makes me the lucky one?

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Dr Jay

The Hardest Thing I Do

Jay Irvin growth, kids, leadership, oregon, parenting, police , , , , , , , ,

LostChild

If it comes up in conversation I usually say that my job isn’t hard. I explain I’m not paid for what I do… I’m paid for what I can do…  I’m a police officer working as a street cop in a medium sized city.

Whatever you think of police (and all the goofy negative press we’ve gotten recently) isn’t really any of my business.  My business is the “people” business.

Roughly 80% of what I do is engaging with and talking to people…. I help them find solutions for situations and crises that they don’t otherwise have solutions for.

The other 20% of what I do is:

  1. documenting what I did or did not do and
  2. training for what I do or do not do.

Like I said, it’s relatively an easy job.

I’ll admit, policing does have challenges:

  • Dealing with people on the worst day of their lives
  • Not having a “fix” when the public thinks I should have one
  • Being constantly targeted by real bad guys or people that would harm me because of my uniform
  • Being under a microscope 100% of the time
  • Either being run down by boredom or freaked out by extreme stress
  • Working shift work on a 24/7 clock (holidays, birthdays, anniversaries etc)
  • Being unable to be in all places at all times
  • Facing all the weather elements
  • Other drivers and traffic
  • Seeing things that can’t be ‘unseen’
  • Dealing with the seedy under-belly of society
  • And a 1,000 other challenges

But these are run-of-the-mill challenges.  The hardest thing I do is deal with kids.

Yesterday we responded to a fight in progress.  The caller reported two men fighting in the grass.  We found a father wrestling his 11 year old son to prevent the son from running away.  The boy was angry, sullen and almost non-communicative.  I thought he was mentally delayed or autistic.  He was not.  He’s just angry…. At 11 years old.  Dad, a non-English speaker, wanted the boy to go to a juvenile facility because of his aggression.  True, the boy was aggressive– he tried to kick and strike a police officer– but there is not a police solution for an 11 year old.

I could only wonder what issues created this aggression in the child.   As a father and an old guy, my heart was wrenching with his pain.  But there is no solution.  It was hard, but we finally got the conflict resolved for the moment….  Father and son climbed into the family van (where the rest of the family had been waiting for 90 minutes) and left back to a neighboring city where they reside.  It was hard to witness.

I got a call about a 13 year old who was ready to hang himself.  This was not the first suicide attempt…. He’d tried before at 11 years old…. but was unsuccessful.  There were marks on his young neck from the attempt 2 years ago.  Mom and step-dad were yelling when I arrived.  Yelling at each other and passive-aggressively including sniping remarks about the boy.   They were concerned about how much it was going to cost them because “he’s f***ing up again”.  I wanted to take them to jail…. but I couldn’t.  I drove the 13 year old to the hospital to get some help….. I checked back a couple of weeks later and the family moved out of town.  It was hard to not be able to follow through and help more.

My partner and I walked through the dark woods to a tree house about 200 yards from the home.  Up in the darkness was a 15 year old boy.  The tree house sat beside the creek and there was a rope swing across the creek.  The boy fashioned a noose out of the rope swing and had it around his neck.  He was gathering the courage to jump and end it all.  We were able to talk him out of the tree house to safety and get him help.  The hardest part was knowing how close we came to finding a dead 15 year old swinging in the darkness.  All because of parents selfish and ignorant rejection of his sexual identity and confusion.

A neighbor called in at 5:45am one morning…. Two kids (ages 5 and 3) were going from door to door knocking because they were afraid.  A rat ran through their apartment and there were no parents home.  I found the kids were alone since about 9:00pm the night before. Apparently this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.  Dad was off in another city on a construction job and mom had a new boyfriend.  Mom decided to leave a 3 year old girl and a 5 year old boy alone because she needed to spend time cheating on her husband with a new, more exciting man.  It took 10 hours to get mom to return the phone calls.  Child service workers, police detectives, even her husband tried to get her to call but she would not.  Yes, she was arrested, but it’s still hard to know these beautiful sweet kids probably don’t have a chance with a mom like this.

The 11 month old baby was alone screaming in the child seat in the back of the car.  As much as it disturbed me, I was happy to hear the child scream.  The child had wriggled around in the seat and she was close to getting her neck caught in the webbing of the car seat and seat belt.  Once caught in the webbing the child would have strangled. Then there would have been no screaming.  As officers broke into the car to rescue the baby I went into Macy’s to find a parent.   She was an apparently cosmopolitan mother who was “just making a return” on an item.  She was in the store almost 40 minutes (according to the security video I found) when she came shrieking out the door.   She saw all the police lights and activity around her car she was mortified… Not that she’d almost lost a child…But that we would take her baby out of the car….Apparently police were ‘interfering’ in her life.

A next-door  neighbor called because the kids across the hall weren’t in school.  I found 3 kids there.  They’d been alone 2 days.  They were 5, 8, and 11 years old.  The house was wretched, stinky, and unsafe.  There was fetid meat rotting on the counter top.  Flies, gnats, and maggots were buzzing and crawling in the over-flowing garbage can. Bags of rancid garbage sat beside the full canister. The kids hadn’t eaten in 2 days.  They had munched on dry cereal and tortilla chips. But the cereal and chips were all gone now.

I found fresh eggs and cheese in the fridge. I scrubbed a fry pan from the filthy sink.  And while my partner tried to find mom and I waited on child services to arrive, I cooked.  In my uniform, on a crud encrusted stove, in a nasty apartment I was a hero to 3 kids.  They were amazed that a man (much less a cop) could and would cook for them.  The kids ate a dozen cooked eggs with cheese.  With some coaching, the kids cleaned the apartment and took out the trash.  When mom was finally contacted she asked “What’s the problem?”  The hardest part was …. well you get the picture.

And the list goes on:   the 3 year old lost on a busy street…. the autistic girl wandering away from the park… the boy who hits his mother and aunt and is then beaten severely by dad….the 12 year old ‘fire bug’ who stole his grandpa’s lighter… or the girl smacked in the face with a wooden spoon (because she cried)…. or dozens of other stories… And knowing what I do makes only a little difference…..That is the hardest thing I do….

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Dr Jay

Who is Your Hero?

Jay Irvin bravery, courage, growth, hero worship, leadership, mindfulness, opinion, oregon, police, psychology , , , , , , , , ,

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a culture we’ve confused celebrity with heroism. We’ve confused fame with nobility. I am saddened by this thinking.

Being considered a hero used to mean you had to have accomplished something that was significant or contributed to society.  You walked on the moon (Neil Armstrong) or led civil rights (Dr King) or averted a nuclear war (Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy) or explored and developed new areas (Daniel Boone) or led an expedition (Lewis & Clark) or conquered the highest mountain (Edmund Hillary) or did something.

Today, most of the celebrity “heroes” are music moguls or athletic stars: They are entertainment figures. I believe music and sports have a place in culture and there are notables in both fields.  Some notables are iconic…. But not heroes. They are famous… But not heroes.  They have celebrity, but are not heroes.

I guess it all comes down to your definition of “hero” or “heroine”.   The generally recognized definitions of hero are: :

  • a mythological or legendary figure
  • one admired for great courage or noble qualities
  • an object of extreme admiration and devotion

The word “hero” comes from Greek “heros” meaning demi-god.  A demi-god is one who isn’t quite a god yet, but has more power than a mere mortal.  To be clear, I’m using the term “hero” which is the masculine form.  “Heroine” implies the same, but in feminine form.  “Heroine” was first used in c.1650.

Webster’s first definition seems to fit the form of demi-god.  Persons held in mythological stature (sometimes fables) from embellished stories passed through generations (Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Robin Hood). Or “super-hero” fantasy characters (Superman, Bat-man, etc.)

For me, the second definition is the one that resonates.  Those people who demonstrate courage or bravery and maintain noble qualities (9/11 responders, combat veterans, those working to help less fortunate: nurses, firefighters, police officers).  These are the people that very seldom become famous but continue to do a difficult thankless job in spite of the lack of rewards.

A real hero is a mom who continues to “do the right thing” even when the no-good dad is nowhere to be found.  A real hero is the teacher’s aide who gives a hungry child a snack from her personal lunch stash.  A real hero is the anonymous citizen who shepherds a lost child until the child is safe.  A real hero is the Average Joe giving CPR until medics show up.  A real hero doesn’t have anything to do with popularity or celebrity.  Most heroes are the unsung ones.

I met a couple of real heroes yesterday.  I had the honor of helping at a fund-raiser for Special Olympics.  There I met a  married couple who happened to be corrections Captains. They have been volunteering for this charity for nearly two decades. Yesterday they spent a 12 hour unpaid Saturday helping make dreams come true for the less fortunate.  They are real heroes, yet there were no TV cameras or media blitz.  They did it because of their noble ideals.

The last definition of heroism is probably the most popular and disappointing (to me).  Idol-worship.  Fame based heroism.  I threw up a little in my mouth when I typed that.  Some celebrities rebel against this archetype– (“I am not a role model”- Charles Barkley).  However most celebrities revel in the hyperbole and believe the hero worship.

I don’t think I’ve ever understood our national fascination with celebrity.  I can’t identify the Kardashians out of a police line up. I think this has to do with my upbringing.  I grew up without television.  My mom was a religious nut and thought TV was evil.  She was serious about it.  My sister and I were not allowed to watch TV at friend’s houses and we were trained to turn away from televisions when we saw them on display in a department store.  Weird, huh?

There were some good side effects from growing up without TV.  I became a prolific reader.  I learned to listen and talk with anybody. I never idolized sports figures nor TV celebrities. The people I held in esteem as heroes were ones I met through our social circles (Lester Roloff, Fred Sink, Joe Hege) or ones I read about (Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhardt, Harry Truman, Apostle Paul, Lincoln, Gandhi, Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, Helen Keller, and the list goes on).

But this isn’t about me.  This is about how we as leaders can effect positive change in our circles of influence. How can we create a shift away from idol worship to true heroism?  Here are some ideas:

  • Set the example. Know your own heroes.  Make your ‘walk’ congruent with your ‘talk’
  • Look for unsung heroes and acknowledge/reward them. What gets rewarded get repeated.
  • Teach values other than becoming famous or popular.  Realize social media “likes” or being popular aren’t good indicators of character or nobility.
  • Know good character is a developed trait. More practice makes better character.  Build yours and theirs.
  • Recognize every real-world hero is human and fallible– They make mistakes AND may still be heroic.  Just because you make mistakes doesn’t necessarily make your actions less heroic. (Think heroic effort)
  • Understand “anti-heroes” and learn why we like them (Bonnie & Clyde, Sopranos, Blackbeard)

Psychologically we need heroes. They give us inspiration and help us aspire to our “higher selves”. And we will find heroes… Consciously or not.  It’s better to make your heroes ones you choose, not ones the media or your boss or your social circle chooses for you.  You are in charge of your own narrative. You can live the life you’ve imagined!

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Dr Jay