It's All Downhill From Here, Or Is It?

“We are lost, but we are making good time.”- Yogi Berra

By Rich Alvarez

My God, where have the years gone? My God I sound like my parents. It’s been awhile since I have blogged, but this year I will turn 50 (not for little while though), so maybe it’s time to get back to it. There is definitely a change in the way you view the world after 50 years. You have the advantage of hindsight, and maybe even a little wisdom. I won’t bore you with the details of my life, that will happen when I’m done with my book, but rather, I’d like to look at American society from my new perspective.

As my friends and family know, I am a Christian, but I’m not the kind that sits in the pews to fulfill my Sunday obligation just to look down my nose at others and judge their lifestyle choices. No, my life has been far too messy for that. It’s still a little messy, and I’m a little rough around the edges. I’m not perfect, but at least I realize that. I am a work in progress, as we all are, or at least should be. That being said, I make every effort to formulate opinions by looking through the lens of my faith. I also try to live out my mission or missions put upon my heart by God. Currently, that involves helping returning citizens and others with significant barriers to success by leading the workforce development efforts at a nonprofit organization. I am in an office more than I like, but I still get into the trenches as much as I can. I will soon be leaving that role, at least to a degree, and starting up two new programs, one being a Second Chance grant for medium to high risk of re-offending returning citizens and the other leading our effort to become a vocational rehab provider. I like new challenges and changes in scenery, so I’m up for the task. The point is that my lens on life comes from being a Christian social worker who works with some of the most forgotten and downtrodden, those who our society often view as disposable or who they do not want to deal with. Many are impoverished, mentally ill, homeless, felons, and substance abusers. Most of these conditions are interconnected. For example, mental illness often leads to substance abuse to quell the pain, which leads to criminal behavior, which leads to poverty and often homelessness. In the richest country on Earth, there are too many left behind, and they are usually the “least of these” that Jesus calls on us to serve. 

So, why did I choose to help “those” people? It was really a calling from God. I didn’t ask for it. 20 years ago, if you told me that I would be doing my job today, I would’ve told you that you were crazy. Heck, I’m a retired, disabled police officer with a pension. I could just sit on the beach and fish, if I wanted to, and live a simple life enjoying all that Florida has to offer. In fact, I used to be one of those people who judged others, like so many in our country do, until I suffered a series of tragedies myself. I suffered many of the aforementioned hardships, but God rescued me. He re-purposed my life to be a true servant, even though I had already served society in different capacities as a corrections officer, EMT, and police officer for 15+ years. Something just changed inside of me, a softening of sorts. I left a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the field. I often wavered between compassionate and hard over various periods of my life, but now I am primarily compassionate, unless the most compassionate thing to do is be hard on someone, or if I have to defend myself.

It is for these reasons that I look back on the past 50 years. Without waxing too nostalgic, there was something far more simple, less stressful, and more fun about growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. While technology can be a great thing, it can also be a curse. In many ways to kids today, it is, but they don’t realize it, because they do not know anything different. Being a member of Generation X, I have spanned the space of little technology to what we have today, and I can tell you it has exploded exponentially in a very short period of time. I’ve gone from rotary phones to palm sized computers that we can video chat with our friends on, something of science fiction when I was growing up. I’ve gone from dial-up internet in the 90's to blazing fast fiber optic cable with wireless technology. This happened in the blink of an eye in my mind, but while it is convenient, it has had some profoundly negative impacts too. Part of what made me who I am was that I was far more physically active than many kids today, playing both solo and team sports, riding my bike, and playing outside all day on the weekends and in the evenings. Very little time was spent in front of the t.v., which had a rotary dial to change channels that you actually had to get up off your ass to change it. We didn’t have computers or other electronic devices to suck up time either. We used our imaginations more, reading books, playing board games or ping pong on rainy days, and playing sports or just exploring on the nice ones. I don’t see as many children doing that these days. If their parents have them in sports, they have them in every sport. They treat the children as though they are going to be professional athletes, instead of just allowing them to have fun or giving them time to just be. They live in an electronic world of television and video games that is simply not real.  It’s part of the reason they often have difficulty to adapting to the realities of a harsh world when they get out on their own. They are unprepared. I hear parents say they don’t want to let their children out alone to play, because something bad might happen to them. This is also a result of technology and the 24 hours news cycle, which pumps every horrifying story you can imagine into those handheld devices we are so addicted to. You can even get news alerts to let you know when the next horrible thing happens anywhere in the world. It’s little wonder parents are terrified, even though those fears are somewhat unjustified. We live in one of the safer periods in our nation’s history. When I was growing up, crime was way higher than it is today, but we were blissfully ignorant to it for lack of constant bombardment from the news outlets where, “If it bleeds, it leads.” While bullying occurred when I was growing up, we didn’t have social media to broadcast it to the world. In fact, we didn’t broadcast anything to the world, unless you had the fortune of doing something really great that got you on the radio or in the paper. I can’t imagine how kids today must feel having their worst moment broadcast for all too see and ridicule. That’s a terrible pressure. Even still, when we were bullied, no one shot up the school to get even. That stuff just didn’t happen. I felt pretty safe at school, even though we had a few fistfights here and there. That lack of security must also have a real impact on a child’s psyche, not knowing if some crazy fellow student is going to come in with a gun and start shooting. We also didn’t have gangster rap, where “shooting motherf*****s” or “raping bitches and hos” is considered a goal to aspire to or “cool” in any way, shape or form. Many of my clients grew up in impoverished neighborhoods, where this is reality. When you have a mom that works two or three jobs just to keep a roof over their child’s head, dad is nowhere to be found because he left or is in jail, and the child is raising themselves, it’s not hard to understand how they can end up going down the wrong path, if this is what is considered “cool”. There are tragedies in my clients’, and even some of my co-workers’, lives all the time due to this “gangster rap” culture. Many of my clients have no other aspirations than to be a rapper or a professional athlete. No one has ever told them how unlikely that is and that there are other options, like being a lawyer, doctor, astronaut, business person, or politician. They often see selling drugs as the only way to get ahead. They haven’t been taught to value education, and many have been so beat-down that they have little hope of escaping their circumstances. That type of hopelessness breeds tragedy.

When you see this type of poverty, tragedy, and lack of positive role models on a daily basis, when you get to know your clients as fellow human beings, it becomes much harder to judge them than when you live in an upper middle class neighborhood, in relative safety, plenty of food on the table, clothes to wear, working a professional job, with a college degree, where you don’t have to even think about the disposable people of our society. They are barely an afterthought, if that. It’s easy to call them leeches for getting public assistance, when you want for nothing, except some other useless toy that you’ll use once or twice before you lose interest. It’s easy to judge others when go to church on Sundays but never actually engage in meaningful volunteer work or missionary work to serve the less fortunate. You avert your eyes and your efforts, even though you might give a little money, because it might interfere with your kid’s sports or your night out with friends. What do you do when you see the homeless person sitting on the sidewalk in front of you? Do you cross the street or avert eye contact, or do you say a kind word, pray with them, or give them some food? What does the Bible command you to do? If you’re not doing it, then who are you to judge others?

In fact, we increasingly live in an insulated and isolated world, which is not healthy. We are hardwired to be social creatures, but most people today couldn’t even tell you their neighbor’s names or anything about their lives. Many go to church and never say a word to their fellow congregants. We prefer a text these days to a phone call. It’s easier, because talking to someone actually takes some time and effort out of your day. There have been studies that show that texting and other electronic communication is actually leading to more stress, and impeding our recovery from stress. Constant light from electronic devices overstimulates our brains so that we experience more stress and sometimes insomnia. One experiment showed that children who were administered a stressful math test responded differently afterward depending on the stimulus they received. Those that got a hug from their mother or heard her voice on the phone had cortisol levels that dropped rapidly, while oxytocin, the love hormone, levels increased. Those that received a text from their mother or got nothing afterward maintained high cortisol levels, which is the unhealthy stress hormone, for thirty minutes post-test. Our plummeting level of social interaction has also caused us to become far more rude. Common courtesy is not common anymore. We probably view people with less compassion, because our busy insulated lives don’t allow us to get to know others. People on social media say things that they would never say to someone’s face. Politicians and other public figures are fostering the problem, as young people view them as role models, but they are treating others horribly, saying things we would have never found acceptable growing up in my era. Crassness has become the norm, rather than the exception.

So, as I come closer to the big Five O, I am grateful for the good memories of my youth, but I am fearful for the future generations. I know there are plenty of good people out there, but they need to be heard from and need to stop letting the bombastic, rude people control the national stage and various forms of media. People need to be called out and shamed for that type of behavior. Good people need to get out and do good to, for faith without works is dead, as they say. We need to humanize others and think what it would be like to walk a mile in their shoes before we shoot off at the mouth with some judgmental opinion. If we just view others as an avatar of sorts or the “other”, it becomes easy to de-humanize them and discard them. Centrists need to rip political power back from the grip of the fringe extremists that have taken over politics today. Most people today are actually centrist, but you only hear from the radicals because they are shouting everyone else down, while they curse each other out and tell you that you are a “sell-out” or not a real whatever if you don’t agree with everything they say, or God forbid, see value in some elements of both sides. The majority needs to grow a pair and fight back for the common, decent people of this country. We need to address mental health in this country. Nearly every major violent tragedy, especially school shootings, has mental health as a central factor behind the motivation. We seem to want to invest in the lost war on drugs and draconian mandatory sentences that support the prison industry instead of substance abuse and mental health, which are central to nearly every crime in the country. The war on drugs has been fought on the wrong end. We need to attack the demand, not by incarcerating users however, rather than the supply. Attacking the supply has not worked. There has been no reduction in supply and prices remain low. In fact, cocaine, when adjusted for inflation, is actually cheaper today than in the 80’s. If what we have been doing was working, simple economics would tell us that supply would be reduced and prices would be up. That’s not the case, so it’s time for a different strategy.

As a society, America seems to be sliding toward a collapse into the abyss suffered by other “great” societies of the past, with creeping moral decay, political infighting and polarization tearing the nation apart, a growing wealth disparity and a disappearing middle class, and the beginnings of real dehumanization of others, especially toward the poor. We simply won’t survive for long on this path. Other nations like China are beginning to surpass us economically. We are performing poorly scholastically when compared to other nations. We have a more expensive and less effective healthcare system than many other industrialized nations, and we are losing stature as a beacon of freedom and leader of the free world too. So, I guess I am waxing nostalgic for a simpler time with less technology induced stress and more human interaction. I yearn for a society where young people hold doors open for women and elders, or give up their seats to the elderly and handicapped without feeling put out or inconvenienced. I wish for everyone to stop being so damned offended by everything and thinking everyone else needs to accommodate them. I wish people would stop trying to bully everyone else to believe what they believe. I wish for a society where people believe in something greater than themselves and believe in treating others as they would themselves, the Golden Rule. I think we can get there, but it’s going to take courage and a massive effort. It will need to start from the top with leadership that behaves that way. We need parents to start instilling values in their children and taking the time to raise them, even if it means that you have fewer “things.” Stop using electronics as a babysitter because you don’t want to deal with your kid. Kick them out of the house on a nice day and get them into a sport to work off excess energy. Limit screen time. Get to know your neighbor. BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE. As Henry Ford said,” Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you are right.” 

In my 50’s I want to be that change, at least to the degree that I am able. I’m a little older, a little fatter, a little slower, a little more sore, a little more tired, but I am NOT done yet. I am stubborn and hard to keep down for long. I am still an optimist and an idealist. I have big dreams that I intend to achieve before I am called home. So, look out America, here starts a new decade for me, and I’m going to come out swinging for the fences.