If you’ve watched any of my previous videos you probably noticed that I am bitter, angry, jaded, and critical of others. I don’t like change. I don’t like people who shirk their responsibilities or who feel they deserve some reward simply because they exist. I believe there are principles of conduct and action that are inherently good and that adhering to a code of conduct is important. I believe that there are moral and ethical absolutes which have been built into the fabric of the universe and that violation of these absolutes cause bad things to happen. I don’t like bad things to happen.
I believe these things because I’m old and I’ve seen a lot of bad things in this world. Old is no longer popular, it seems… one more reason that I am bitter. Old seems to stand for inflexible, outdated, worn out, and… the worst connotation… useless. I don’t want to be useless. For anyone who is “old school” , being useless is one of their greatest fears.
I don’t feel useless. I feel like I have a lot to offer and that my words are designed to help and nurture a younger generation of people that are struggling with so much rapid change at once. Apparently, I scare you. Sorry. My formative years and most of my life happened at a much slower pace than yours. I had a chance to think about information and to decide whether to believe or not to believe those words. I took sips of knowledge daily, you guys drink information through a fire hose. You are confusing information for knowledge, and you are confusing knowledge with wisdom. They aren’t the same things. I don’t say that to be condescending. It’s just an observation. No wonder you’re scared. No wonder you have such a high rate of suicide and anxiety in your age group. I get anxious when I see so much polarization in information the same as you do. It seems like there is no common ground between races, ages, or any social group anymore. It angers me. It seems like it frightens you.
I don’t feel like I should have to explain myself but I will give you a little background information to help you understand why I am this way.
My youth was spent outdoors. When I was six or seven years old my Dad was sent to VietNam during the war and was assigned a billet that allowed him to take his family with him to Thailand. I spent a year climbing trees with a neighbors’ pet gibbon, playing in the flood waters from the annual monsoon season, watching the children from a totally different culture swim in sewage infested rivers and streams, and being told by my mother to make sure I was in the house before dark because that’s when the “snakes” come out. Thailand has real snakes… cobras! I only saw one cobra but I saw plenty of lizards. There was real danger where I lived and grew up. I learned to cope and even became mentally stronger because I had a choice. I could either melt down or move forward. I chose the latter and the rest of my life has been about moving forward into the face of fear.
After a stint in the U.S. Army, including some time as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne I became a paramedic and spent the next 30 years caring for sick, injured, dead, and dying people. I saw lots of bad things. I lived a lot of bad things. I’ve done a lot of bad things. My life has not been perfect. In fact, most people would say it has been pretty harsh. A divorce, plenty of failures and false starts, in other words… normal. I’m “old school.”
Old school means you take responsibility for your own safety. Old school means you can’t expect someone else to jump in and save you from your fears, you have to deal with them and overcome them yourself or die, yes, literally die. Cobras don’t care about your fears and there was no such thing as 911. Believe it or not, I didn’t even use a telephone until I was about twelve and it was too heavy to carry around anyway. It was also tied to a wall with a cord. My first telephone system was two plastic cups with string tied between them. Reception wasn’t very good then. Some things don’t change.
Information came at us slowly, mostly through dinner table conversations. Yes, we actually sat down together, at the same time, without telephones or television, and ate dinner and talked, not texted, about our day. Our parents and, very importantly, our grandparents were our source of information about the world. We heard opposing views. Grandpa would have one view, Dad would have another, Grandma would add some observation, and Mom would contribute her perspective. We kids pretty much sat in silence and wondered what the heck they were talking about. We didn’t know what a war even was. We heard the words, war, Viet Nam, killing, but they were not part of “our” lives. My only concern was how to get up enough speed to jump my bicycle across the creek. While we lived in Thailand, just a couple mountain ranges away from the “war”, I wasn’t even aware there was a war. We were insulated by the speed of information. It was slow, it was filtered by our parents, and it was limited to simple auditory. The more senses that are involved in information the more emotional and stirring it becomes. The younger generation is being beaten senseless, literally their senses are being deadened, by an onslaught of visual and auditory detritus. I know how dead your senses can become when exposed to stimuli enough. My experience of those stimuli involved every sense though. I smelled the blood, brains and body fluids, felt the bones grinding, tasted the mist of bile as it hung in the air. Yuck!
My generation was fed small bites of adversity until we were strong enough to handle bigger bites. Cursing and rough language was something that you only heard between men who were digging ditches or whose profession was military in nature. If I had seen the graphic images of just your run of the mill, average, war video game when I was twelve I would have had nightmares for months. We didn’t see brains flying, people being blown up, Blood spewing everywhere, or hear the sound of sirens and bullets… ever. Now, commercials everywhere show more violence and death than I saw in an entire 30 year career as a paramedic and small children see those images regularly. Anything you see often enough desensitizes you to its presence. This is a scientific fact. If you are exposed to death enough, you don’t think of it as a bad thing, which is good because death is normal. What is bad is being exposed to causes of death that are unnatural and premeditated. War, murder, rape… those are bad deaths, those are things you don’t ever want to see, not even accidentally. I’ve seen those things. It was my job to see those things and it has affected me.
I haven’t been diagnosed with PTSD, but I’m pretty sure I have it. That’s another “old school” habit. We don’t need, so called, “experts” to tell us what to do. We figure it out on our own. We are self-reliant. We hide our weaknesses and mourn and deal with things privately. This whole talking it out thing is new to us. I can see some benefits to it, but I’m not going to let some guy who is just as messed up as I am tell me what I should do to fix myself. He’s just as pathetic as a human being as I am. None of us is perfect. He can’t know everything about me. I am the only one who knows everything about me and it is my responsibility to fix my own problems or else I become a problem to others. I don’t want to be a problem to others. I want to help others.
The feedback I’ve received about my previous videos from my wife, mostly, has not been positive. I listen to her, most of the time, because she’s a really smart lady. I never listen to trolls. They are even more messed up than me. I realize after nearly a year off of posting that I was really, really, really, angry at the world and I still am. Healing is a process. I’ve retired from EMS. I don’t deal with the horrors I used to on a regular basis and I can tell that my attitude is improving. I have a long way to go but I’m taking steps. When I’m tired I backslide. I get, as kids say, “triggered” sometimes. But the important thing is to do what I learned to do as a kid. Keep moving forward. Don’t give up. The sun will come out again. When you are about to give up just take one more step.
Don’t try to fix the world. Fix yourself first, because you are messed up too. If I’ve learned one thing in thirty years of taking care of humans it is that we share one common trait; we’re all messed up. Even doctors, sometimes especially doctors, are messed up. Pointing fingers at other peoples’ faults is only an attempt to hide your own faults from others. It’s a bad habit. I know. I do it all the time.
So here’s the deal… I’m gonna keep “talking it out” and hopefully something I say will help you to deal with a problem in your life while helping me to deal with all of the “bad” things I’ve had to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear. Just think of me as your grumpy old Grandpa.
But, then again… why would you listen to me?
Cuz I’m just a Dumigod.
I love you guys.