THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE ...

Today isn't my normal working day. I should be on the second of my four days off. But in this fire department we have the unique ability to trade shifts with other firefighters, and a month ago Howard worked for me so I could go to West Yellowstone, Montana. Well, as they say, paybacks are . . . nasty. Or at least they say SOMETHING like that.

So here I am, working at Fire Station 3, one of the busier stations in this city of 52,000 people. We are normally allotted time in the morning to workout, but I am in the habit of getting up and going to the gym before work, especially when I know I'll be at one of the busy stations, because, like today, I have missed far too many workouts by thinking I would be able to do it on shift.

But that isn't the topic of this blog, just one of my many sidetrails you all must be used to by now. The topic of this blog is the old saying, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Our most recent call tonight was to a trailer park. One of the more poverty stricken trailer parks in town. As we pulled into the park, there were police cars everywhere, and in one particular yard were the cops who drove them--my former comrades-in-arms. There were also the denizens of the trailer park everywhere we looked, from very young to fairly old, including all ages in-between.

The call was for a battery, and it was obvious who was battered from where the group of cops was standing. It seems, from what bystanders said, that this fellow had attempted to molest a thirteen-year-old girl, and someone caught him before he could and laid him out on the sidewalk.

I won't get into my feelings on this topic, because I have four children of my own, I would literally die for them, and if I were to begin a blog about child molesters it would be pages and pages long.

What I thought of most at the time, however, was those poor children--and yes, the adults, too--living in that trailer park. Cigarette smoke filled the yard we were standing in, the grass-less, tree-less, dusty, littered yard. I could also smell the odor of alcoholic beverages, and sweat, and dog feces.

There was a time I would have scorned these people. Why would they choose to live like this? Why can they not change their lives, get a good job, and be useful members of society?

Now, I only pity them. My heart goes out to those little children, and the adults whose past choices--and sometimes LACK of choices--brought them to this place in life, where at a glance everything seemed so bleak and hopeless. What chance do those children have? For that matter, what chance do those adults really have, adults who likely once were children living exactly the same way as the children in that park tonight.

I find myself whining sometimes about not being able to pay a bill, about not being able to buy a new computer. And then I go on a call like the one tonight, and I remember how much I have compared to so many other people in the world. Not for one minute to I advocate taking money from the middle class and doling it all out to the poor. To a certain extent, a person can change his life. He is the master of his destiny. Some people truly are simply lazy and don't want a job. But when a child is born into an environment like what I saw tonight, they are starting out on a path from which it must be very hard to break away. I was not born on that path. I was born on a path one step up from poverty, and my hunger as a child, my lack of heat in the house, and the lack of ability to take a bath more than once a week because we had no hot water heater drove me to want to give something better to my own children.

But I could just as easily have been born into a trailer park like the one I saw tonight. I could just as easily feel the hopelessness those children must feel and see the entire universe through gray-colored glasses. At least those folks live in America, and that's a start. But they have a big job if they are going to pull themselves out of a depressing hole, and they have not likely been equipped with as many tools as the more fortunate of us in life to do that job.

We should all say a prayer for those people who seem from the start destined to live life in a dirty trailer park. We should all say a prayer for ourselves, too. For there but for the grace of God go I ....