I near the end of my training here. I am happy to see the end near. I miss my little ER, my job, my life, my dog. It has been a fantastic learning experience. I feel better and more confident and more able to deal with trauma when it will happen to me in the future. I am better in my job because of this.
All that said, I do not have to enjoy all the experiences that I have had here. Seeing this ugly side of humanity day in and day out for years would hurt me. I do not enjoy seeing the blood and guts of a person spilled out onto the floor. I do not enjoy watching blood dry into little lumps of red jello pudding. I do not enjoy seeing the depths to which humanity will descend into to hurt others. Yes, my vision is skewed because what I see is the funnel of bad, I am sitting at the bottom of that funnel as the hurt and pain of this place showers down upon me. It is what I will think of when I think of this city from now on.
A good friend and I had a conversation about violence just the other day. She chooses to live in this situation because it is what it is. I choose to flee this place because it is what it is. I detest the violence that I see presented to me on an hourly basis. This is a monument to the pain and suffering that we humans deliver upon ourselves. As much as this place is a result of the suffering of humanity, I still feel that there is a place for violence. I can not even after seeing everything that I have, that there is not a place for violence. Part of me wishes that I could say that, that I could see this shit and turn that into non-violent thoughts. There are still things that I would defend with my life, and that I would use deadly force to defend. Yes there are things in this life that I value more than another human's life. Yes, I am making a judgement call and saying that my loved ones are worth more than a 16 year old kid on crack who just wants his next fix. If he were holding a gun at those I love, I would drop him dead, two to the chest, one to the head.
Because that leads to the other valuable lesson that I have learned here. That is that to some people, the life of another human is worth less than an i-phone, a pair of shoes or 25$ in cash. Life has less meaning in this place. That is sad.
M@
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Almost done.
Posted by Emergingjourney at 5:44 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
We just had our first homicide in Pasadena for 2010. Sad day. I just wrote a blog post to try to process my thoughts on it.
We are not so different in that we both hate what violence does to people, we just have different ideas about how to respond to it. If someone was attacking Rex or one of my girls, I think that I would probably respond with force if using words didn't work. But I don't think I could kill someone; I would just try to incapacitate them. Who knows. It's hard to say until you are actually in the situation. For now, I am committed to doing what I can on the prevention end to keep more kids from getting sucked into the cycle of violence.
Post a Comment