Preserving Humanity

We are the culmination of our experiences. The mind and body think and react based upon past experiences, creating anticipated outcomes. Shared experiences and beliefs create cultures, and cultures create predictability. The shared beliefs shape the shared reactions and outcomes of lived experience.

The cultures found among law enforcement and the military are brash, dark, and filled with head-turning humor. Outsiders are convinced we have long abandoned our humanity and compassion, but that could not be further from the truth. The rates of suicide and substance abuse in these cultures speak volumes. The destructive attempts to drown out the overwhelming pain.

I, of course, cannot speak in absolutes or say always, but only in generalities. The vast majority of those who swear an oath believe in that oath, in which we swear to uphold the Constitution and protect the country from threats, both foreign and domestic. We all know the ones who seek power and prestige, but these are few and far between. They stand out because they are the minority.

The outsider often sees the violence and destruction, but they fail to see or understand the love and selflessness. The majority hold so much love and passion for the communities and country they serve that they are willing to risk their lives to preserve and protect.

We have not abandoned our humanity; we are trying desperately to protect it. The jokes, anger, substance abuse, and brashness are attempts to preserve our humanity. To cope with the reality that you cannot always be fast enough or good enough to save them all. To know that the fable that good always triumphs over evil is not borne out in reality, but to hold desperately to that ideal so as not to lose all hope.

We build walls to have some semblance of a life. We must be able to make difficult decisions in moments of chaos and life and death without the fog of emotion, denying the natural state of mind and body. We must live and thrive in the violence and chaos and return to the relative peace of our lives. We build walls because we must be the voice of reason and decisive action among pain and suffering. We must not see our own children, parents, friends, and loved ones in those moments. We must abandon empathy, knowing it is what drives us to work harder.

We must find the impossible balance of being the stoic voice of reason and decisiveness in chaos and the loving and caring person in the aftermath. The pendulum must swing from one extreme to equilibrium. We are forced to deny Newton’s Third Law of Motion. We force the pendulum to stop at neutral, time after time, until the force becomes too much. The laws of motion stop for no man. What is left in the wake are exhausted and tattered humans attempting to do and be the impossible.

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Jake Smith is a law enforcement officer and former Army Ranger. He deployed to Afghanistan four times during his Army service. For The Havok Journal, he writes from the perspective of both military service and law enforcement, often on military life, leadership, loss, and transition.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.