BEWARE YOUR NORMAL

First of all, let me apologize to everyone, and most particularly the editorial team for my hiatus recently.  I had several things going on and several articles in the works, and each time I felt like I was making headway, something would happen in the world to push me in another direction.

One of the pitfalls that, I believe, ordinary people have when trying to predict or understand the possibilities of how others will act in the future is them thinking that those other people will process and view the world as they do.  It’s easy to do.  When we try to imagine others, we tend to nuance that with our own outlooks and the circle of people we know as a benchmark, of sorts.

But most of us TTP readers are, probably, more or less, on a normal baseline with like-minded conservatives; and therein lies the problem.

War story time.

Nowheresville, Texas.  Several years ago. Some unimportant details altered for security:

I stood in the kitchen of the house; a large, two-story affair that outwardly looked like all of the other homes on the street.  But it wasn’t like those.

I had to literally squeeze sideways through the large spaces because of the paper—books, articles, documents, as well as file folders, that were piled up four to five feet deep in the living room and hallways.  I tried to imagine what would have happened if a fire had started in this place; it would have erupted like an atom bomb.  Then I stopped imagining; I was standing in the middle of it all.

Despite the clutter, it was all fairly well organized save for the kitchen and one room that was basically filled with garbage.  Seven people lived in the house—a man, a woman, and four girls who looked, talked, and acted otherwise normally to my ears, and a three-year-old boy.  At least, he used to live there.

The woman was a registered nurse, and the man an IT professional who had networked the place with four computers.  The girls were well dressed, clean—despite the house—and articulate.  But something had gone terribly wrong today.  The toddler belonging to the oldest of the girls had climbed on one of the oak bookcases filled with material, and it had fallen in one of the few areas of the house that didn’t contain stacks of paper, and had crushed the child.

EMS had confirmed the child dead on scene.  He was now evidence, not a person.

My fellow officers and I did the universal preliminary steps for investigation of a suspicious death—we secured the scene and got all of the people out of it.  We took down their basic information and waited until the detectives arrived, who would begin the investigation in earnest.

Somehow, in that process, you wind up talking with them about all sorts of minor things in addition to reading their driver’s licenses.  A lot of it stemmed from their own unsolicited statements; what we call “res gestae”.  The big rule was not to question them about the case.  Small talk was small talk, practically and legally. The latter was to be done carefully.

All the while, I marveled at how each and every one of these folks seemed so clearheaded and… totally unaware of the extreme and dangerous conditions they were living in, and how seemingly they were oblivious to how this had contributed to the tragedy of the day.  They were detached.  They spoke as normally as some random persons you would meet in the line at Wal-Mart.  Or at the hospital.  Or computer business.

I was jarred out of my contemplation by the first detective’s arrival, and calling out to Central Dispatch that they were on scene.  My mind began to shift as we handed the scene off to the detectives and criminalists (evidence handlers).

Soon, I and my partners were killing time, happy that we only had to write brief reports (the main one was being done by the first arriving officer and all of the follow-ons), remembering that we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and talking about all of the reports that we hadn’t done yet.  It was my Friday and I wanted to get it handled before my days off.

We got clear of that scene and sat down to eat at our favorite Mexican place (there are many in Texas).  I had a quesadilla and rice, “sort of” flirted with the blushing and bubbly senorita who was our server, got to the station, and spent the last two hours of the shift in the report room banging out two reports I was still holding; finishing up right on the dot of 6 PM; our shift’s normal quit time.

Not but once or twice in the time between me clearing my call and me going home did I really stop to think—or care—about the tragedy that had just happened, and then not significantly.  There had been a time when I would have been “blown away” by what I had seen and heard there, but no longer.

Although I describe the cast of characters in a way to illustrate how “abnormal” they were, I can’t let myself off the hook.  It probably isn’t normal for someone to be able to see a dead child and their grieving relatives, and put it out of their mind literally minutes later.

It gets worse, or more expansive.  I have seen strong men and women; combat veterans, dangerous persons in the mold of Bat Masterson or Wyatt Earp, brave officers…  brought low by the sight of a dead child or some other “trigger” or situation that, for them, had far more impact than it did for me.

I have had officers tell me their daughter was raped by a relative the night before, and they were stuck on what to do about it—this, from a trained police officer.  Why did it throw them for such a loop?  Because it was personal; and when you are personally involved in something, you can lose your objectivity faster than you know.

That got handled, by the way—by some other uninvolved officers, and ultimately by another agency.  We saw to it.  And yes, it was handled within the law.

I say all of this to say the following:  When you read or hear the news, and see the activities of other persons who “seem nuts”, I would encourage you to consider:  What you might characterize as extreme behavior or beliefs may indeed be normal for them, and thus, your ideas about what they may or may not do, or how they might react to you or others, may be skewed.

It isn’t your fault.  It’s just a fact.  And when they seem dangerous, or lunatic, or threatening, it may well not be an act—they may indeed be that crazy or that evil.

It would be really helpful for you to bear in mind not only the best-case scenario when you confront the world’s people, but also the worst-case scenario, no matter how remote, and somewhere in between the two have some awareness, flexibility of mind, and at least something of a plan to deal with either-or, or something in between.

Someone figured out that the average police officer sees several times the dysfunction, danger, misery, and outright human crash-outs in their career than a legion of people in other lines of work see in their entire lives.  It’s probably true, at least for a cop working a city or county in a traditional policing role.

It’s not something to be proud of.  Aside from what I mentioned earlier, others can tell you about our rates of suicide, divorce, domestic violence, and substance abuse.

But it has given me this perspective, that I share with you all in the hopes it will give you just a little bit of an edge in processing how to live your life without you having to go through all that.

Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.