New American Truth

We have celebrated Police Week with our services of Honor and Memorials. We have recognized many new names carved into or molded onto our local and national memorials. We have stopped to meditate and remember.

Most of us started off young and somewhat naive… Young and vigorous… World changers… We would make a great difference in relation to the things we had seen and heard that were destructive to human life and property.

During my years of leading the chaplain unit we cooled a lot of hot spots involving crowds, assisted many individuals in meeting many of their needs, kept people under arrest from creating worse problems once they were under arrest and occasionally assisted officers in making arrests by helping to calm a rowdy person into submission…

They are so dear to us, yet so greatly misunderstood and almost foreign to our citizens. Some of our citizens even think they can live their lives with no need for the Peace Keepers who risk life and limb to secure peace and safety for all the rest of us.

Sometimes we suffer through much as a nation, as a community and as individuals… Sometimes Peace Keepers suffer much… Sometimes other Public Safety suffers much… This week we all suffered much!

I never cease to be amazed by the incidents and evidence that I see and hear. This causes a lot of meditation on my part… Plus it makes me think back over those places where I was hung out like a sheet in the wind as I did my duty exactly as I was trained to do it.

ANY TIME, ANY PLACE… That UNWANTED event may catch up to us and we can be captured, injured or killed… Something we did not see… Did not HEAR… Did not KNOW!!!

Celebrate!… The bad news in relation to Peace Keepers is much less in number today… That can be seen as good news… That is good news to me! It surely is much better than that long list last week.

Dark alleys, stinky garbage filled alleys, mud puddles (we had to break up a vicious fight that was taking place in the middle of a huge puddle of water in an alley), rickety stairs, dark hallways, filthy living spaces with much refuse of garbage and human waste with only narrow walkways from room to room, bloody scenes, gory scenes…

Faith is doing the best you can with what you have where you are and leaving the rest to God or whomever else is responsible. I did that this week as I fought to recuperate. In my still times I thought on all of you and on your fields of endeavor wherever you are.