I greatly admire soldiers and police and Sheriffs officers. Because you often are dealing with people that have all sorts of perceptual issues and you never know when one of them is going to kill you or where.
In the early 1990s I was going through a really terrible divorce. My son had been in a really terrible traffic accident and was sort of traumatized by his front tie rod in his steering mechanism breaking which caused his truck to flip three times forwards at about 50 to 60 miles per hour which totaled his truck. He was too traumatized from this event to drive a car for several months after this. My wife then his step mother told him he had to go to Job Core if he was to traumatized to go to college then.
There people tried to kill him more than once and I hated her for this position she took and this eventually permanently ended our marriage along with many other things. I erroneously blamed my ex for the death of my father then and for what happened to my son.
However, on the bright side of things he became A Plus certified as a Computer technician from going to Job Core in San Jose and eventually returned to college and got a Bachelor of Science degree from San Bernadino state university in southern California. And he still likes to design and build his own computers as a hobby which are like Ferraris in that they are more high performance for gaming than you can presently buy anywhere.
So, even though these times because of my marriage were very tough and I took a job as a Counselor for Juvenile Offenders partly because I had a death wish because I couldn't imagine my marriage ending after 14 years. So, this transitional job actually helped me a lot in the long run and made me tough enough to actually survive my divorce (even though it led to getting a heart virus by age 50 and having to retire so I didn't die.
However, by then I had remarried and my fortunes had changed completely and since I almost died I have been by far been the happiest in my life and had now been retired the last 17 years mostly and traveling the world and visiting friends whenever I could.
So, imagine it is the 1990s and I'm in my early 40s and going through a really awful divorce with my son from my first marriage who had just almost died in a traffic accident in which if you looked at his truck no one should have survived this accident.
So, when I began this job I remember the boys I counseled swearing at me and other new counselors. They would say things like "I'm going to kill you you mother f-----." and "you ass h--- get the hell out of here."
So, 4 out of 5 of new counselors couldn't deal with a 12 to 17 year old swearing like this at them all the time so they quit the first day.
However, I was going through a bad divorce and had been raising my own teenagers since the early 1980s. So, I had some empathy for these kids because I could see there had been no one at all that they could ever trust.
Also, they had all been put there because they hadn't used a gun in their 7 felonies they had committed which allowed them to be in a position where they got this opportunity to not go to CYA.
The California Youth Authority is where boys go that usually will become lifelong criminals. Because often they have used guns to kill people or to wound people or to threaten people. So, once in the CYA boys will be killed there by other boys or made someone's bitch and they likely have no future as a normal person after that.
So, as a counselor I was told I had a 1 in 4 chance of saving these boys from a life of crime.
This made complete sense to me at the time. However, what was really really strange in being a counselor was that the easiest people to deal with were the ones who had already committed to a life of crime because they all had an order to them. An against the law order but this allowed me to corral them into some type of order among the boys I was responsible for as a counselor.
This was a new program to try to save boys. It didn't last many years because after I quit two counselors were murdered by the boys in one of the facilities. One was stabbed and the other counselor was beaten to death by the boys.
As counselors we were not allowed any weapons and if we called the police ever we were fired. So, you really had to have balls of steel or just be crazy enough to take a job like this.
For me, I'm a natural intuitive so I always knew the motivations of each boy and when I was safe and when I wasn't. And when I knew I wasn't safe anymore I just quit that same day.
The day I quit was because a 15 year old boy who was in there because he had taken PCP and then threatened his family with a gun had a psychotic episode. I took away 6 shanks (homemade knives) from him that day so I knew something was really wrong. What set him off I don't know. But, when he got a hold of a large butcher knife from the kitchen and I had to disarm him, I had a hard time not killing him. Because the era I grew up in when someone came at you with a knife you killed them right there no questions asked. It was just the way it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So, I realized I wasn't a policeman who was paid to kill people and I didn't want to kill any 15 year old so I quit right then realizing this boy and I were both in trouble and it was just too crazy to continue any more.
Then after I quit and left the next counselor the same boy got a mop handle and threatened the next counselor with it and he called the police and he got fired. But at least he didn't die or have to kill the boy either.
Another situation was an ayrian Nation boy ( White Power) came into the facility and tried to strangle an African American boy from Oakland, California. The Oakland boy called his cousin to come kill this guy which he came and was ready to do. We as counselors had to get the Ayrian nation boy into another facility before he got killed because we were not allowed to call the police without getting fired. We barely succeeded at this before the Oakland boy's cousin arrived armed ready to kill the white boy.
The other interesting thing was this African American boy told me that he was glad he was in this facility because if he was in Oakland he would be murdered by a rival gang. So, part of why he was there he said was just to stay alive.
Working with these boys I experienced a level of PTSD I realize now. Towards the end of this job I was thinking of carrying a gun in my car in case either the 13s or 14s, A designation of what used to be called the "Crips" and the "Bloods" in Southern California or at that time the Nortenos or Surenos at that time also. So, basically I was worried I needed to carry a weapon because of my job.
When I met my next wife in Fall of 1994 and we went out around Christmas time the first movie we saw together was "Pulp Fiction". I told her that the boys I counseled were exactly like the people in this movie only they were 12 to 17 years old.
She said I shouldn't ever do that kind of work anymore because it was messing me up. I agreed and started going to a counselor which helped with my divorce and trying to get custody of my then 5 year old daughter. Then my new wife and I had a daughter too.
So, by the time I got a heart virus at age 50 my new daughter was 2 1/2 years old and I refused to die and leave her and my then 9 year old daughter without a father.
It's amazing all the people you have to be in the course of a lifetime. For most people this job would have been insane like some soldier's and police jobs where you are almost certain to get injured or killed in the line of duty.
But, for me, this toughened me up enough to survive my divorce and also made me strong enough to survive my heart virus so that even when I could have died like everyone else I knew of in California then with a heart virus, I was tough enough to survive when everyone else didn't.
So, even as I passed out over and over again I refused to panic as I passed out because I knew I would die and then I couldn't be a father to my two daughters growing up. By then, my son was in his twenties and my step daughter and step son were one and three years older than my son.
Everyone of my children has succeeded in life so far and I'm grateful I stayed alive to help them whenever I could.
But, part of what made me strong enough to stay alive for my kids was this crazy crazy job that showed me so much about people. Criminals aren't at all what most people think they are.
Mostly they just want respect. So, if you don't respect them they just might kill you.
This is the lesson I learned from being a counselor to male Juvenile offenders 12 to 17 years of age.
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