Honorable, Difficult Profession

A community lost a hero today.  He was a silent hero - I didn't know him until today and it was too late.  I look at the picture of him, his wife and his little boy that one of the news agencies posted and it breaks my heart.  The little boy, who looks to be about two years old, will grow and slowly, but surely, forget pretty much everything he knows about his father.  The only things that will strike his memory are the things that his mother and others who loved his father tell him.  Sgt. Derek Johnson didn't deserve to be gunned down in his car as he drove to help someone in need.

Rest In Peace Sgt. Derek Johnson
May you watch over your little boy
from the heavens above

I've worked in public safety a very long time.  Not many have surpassed the amount of years I've put in - only a few have hit the milestone that I'm at now.  Nobody in this world, myself included, knows what it is to walk in the shoes of a police officer or a firefighter.  There are a lot of armchair quarterbacks out there who openly suggest they could do it better or that the cops are all but human, but, those guys would crumple and cry if they had to spend even a day in their shoes.  The things they have seen - mothers holding their dead babies who have died from just not waking up or at the hands of someone who just wanted to stop them from crying, mangled bodies pulled from the wreckage of a horrific car crash, women who think they are loved who have been beaten again - and may even turn on them when the officer has to arrest the perpetrator, burned bodies from someone running back into the fire to save something and losing their own life.  They also deal with the mundane - burglary after burglary, fender bender after fender bender, traffic stop after traffic stop.  But, I can only imagine the pain they feel when they drive up to a scene only to find one of the brothers or sisters in arms dead or nearly dead because someone decided that day they had the right to turn a weapon on their comrade.

When I started my job so many years ago, I walked in one January day to turn in my application - so long ago, you actually did it by hand and not on the internet.  I walked in to hand it over and was told, "Um, I think everyone is at the funeral".  They were talking about Sgt. Ron Heaps funeral.  He was gunned down, much like Sgt. Johnson was today, while answering a call of duty.  Sgt. Heaps was going to check out a suspicious vehicle - when he and his backup knocked on the door, a man opened it and also opened fire - killing Sgt. Heaps and critically injuring the other officer.  Gunfire was returned and the suspect was also shot and killed.  It just goes to show, things don't change.  There are bad people out there.  Those bad people will do stupid things; either out of evil or desperation.

My grandson who is eight years old has a superhero fixation.  One day, he told his mom how he knew that he really couldn't be a superhero when he grows up, so he decided he wanted to be the next best thing to a superhero - and that would be a police officer.   In some ways, I really hope he doesn't get his wish.  I don't want him to have to deal with the assholes and idiots that one day may decide that he can't go home ever again and there may be a little boy of his own waiting for him - and I would hate for that little boy to not remember anything about him.