Regulars readers of my articles may have wondered where my brother, Sergeant Young, has run off to after providing us with a few excellent posts on life behind the badge.
Two months ago he did what for many police officers is nearly unimaginable. He laid down his badge and walked away just eight years shy of retirement. He did this completely on his own for no other reason than he recognized what it was costing him to stay. He sent me his story to share with you and I am honored to do so. Any of you who have struggled hard with the issue of career change will find much to think about here.
There is a saying I have grown fond of. It is not my own but I use it from time to time. The saying goes that you can’t look into the void without the void looking into you.
Early on I wrote about how it is difficult to be both he and it, how it was difficult to find balance as a Police Officer. As time went on, I came to realize I was paid to fixate on the negative. My job was not only to be aware that bad things happen and to respond to those bad things, my job was to go out and look for it. After a while you get so good at it that you see it everywhere, all the time. This, among other things, can make you angry.
I was very angry.
I consider myself to be fairly introspective. I was aware I was angry but I had it pretty well under control, at least from my point of view. I had been out in the field for almost thirteen years; thirteen years of the same crap. I saw the pattern that has developed in modern law enforcement. Excellence is expected as the norm. The only time you ever hear anything is when you don’t meet that expectation. Sound familiar?
I had been working for a small department for eleven of those thirteen years. During that entire time we were under-manned and under-equipped. The building we operated in should have been condemned. The roof leaked and there was mold. There was no such thing as air exchange. Air exchange becomes real important when you have to walk past the jail cells to get in and out of the building, especially when every damn one of the prisoners seems to have a bad case of athlete’s foot; and we take their shoes from them. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Laura, Your brother, Captain Jason Young, is truly a man of courage.
It takes real courage to leave security and seek something that will fulfill the heart and soul.
I worked with fellow I had hired at Burger King in 1985 when the store first opened. He had been an army cook and was searching... searching for a job, a girl, a life. I had left the store several years later to try for better jobs in restaurant management, but they didn't work out. When my wife gave birth to our second son, I was working the night shift at a different Burger King in the Mexican neighborhood of St. Paul. Every night she'd call, complaining that she needed help with the infant and the two year old, who young as he was, sensed he had been keicked off the "throne" of sole attention from his parents...
Eventually, I realized that being daddy had to come first and being the provider would have to come second. So I quit for the sake of my sons and wife. For a time I worked the graveyard shift at a motel as a night auditor, but I needed to sleep through the night and see my kids in the evening, and be on the same schedule they were, more or less. Eventually, I wound up at the same Burger King I had helped open in 1985, working as an equal with the fellow I had hired in 1985. He was married and by the time I left, he already had three daughters. But he was very dissatisfied and constantly on the look for a better paying job. To my knowledge, my former colleague is still working at the Burger King I managed. If he is still there, it will be 21 years that he is working at that restaurant.
I have moved on and am looking out at the mountains of Samaria, writing. We're almost always on the edge, financially, but we are all more content than we were in the United States. The little infant that my wife needed help in 1991 with is a strapping and strong man. The older son is almost at draft age. And I'm living the dream of a lifetime...
2 - Laura Young
Thank you, Ruvy. Yes, in some professions there is such a culture of belonging/culture of identity bound up in the role that leaving is so much harder. For Jason to step away from that identity and the authoritative status that came with it was huge. It's funny, being his sister, how much more of the man I have come to appreciate in him by reading his writings.
And your story as well...such hard choices to make in the short term but when you follow the trajectory out as you have and see just how far you can come...how much alignment there is in what one values and what one chooses to do with life ultimately in contract to those who stay and wait for some day. It's quite sobering.
Thank you for contributing your thoughts here,
L