Just a general comment about this whole thing and other topics that are discussed on here. It is the lack of compassion I see from a lot of board members that really disappoints me about the pilot community. There are some people who would do anything for anyone. Then there are others that would not **** on you if you crashed and were on fire. Sadly I guess the pilot community is not unlike the rest of this country. Sad really. We used to be a country that would look out for one another. Now we are just in it for ourselves and more interested in making sure no one but ourselves get anything. Misfortune for others is now entertainment for a great many in this country.
My battery was low on the gadget, so I had to save this for another post...
Drunks are part of my family history. They'll do anything to suck on a bottle, even while you're trying to help them. My step-sister had to do an intervention on her MOM, throwing meth-heads out of the house, putting her mom in rehab, and changing the locks. Our family "gets" addiction.
We don't have to look outside the little dysfunctional tribe to find an addict to help.
The one thing even the heavy drinkers in our family will not tolerate in the slightest is getting behind the wheel of a motor vehicle intoxicated. This is zero-tolerance. I've watched functional alcoholics in my family ready to kick someone's ass over this, in person.
You can waste your life away in a bottle at home or at the bar with a cab ride home, all you want. But you get in a car and drive, and we're letting you rot in jail and we'll happily testify against you in court. It's where the line is drawn.
We also have had in the past a number of truck drivers in our family. Folks who did difficult driving in awful conditions. One was a State snowplow driver in the Rockies for an entire career, now happily retired.
Me? I'm one of two pilots in the entire extended family tree. The other owns a 210 in Texas somewhere and I rarely see him... a third cousin or something like that.
So my reaction to a drunk truck driver or a drunk pilot is pretty much that I'm going to kick your ass. I don't care if you say you never drove drunk, I know better.
I'm not the person to look for compassion in for drunk machinery operators.
I will never have compassion for that, ever. I've got too many family members who make a living on the road, and myself... I'm too happy and amazed to be lucky and successful enough to have the privilege of flying aircraft to ever believe there's someone out there who'd put a bottle higher in their priorities than that.
Color me unsympathetic when it comes to alcoholics... I've watched too many from childhood to adulthood who willingly picked up a bottle and crawled in... every night. Some during the day. They chose.
They weren't "disabled". They chose. They picked up the bottle and poured it in their pie-hole.
Thus my initial negative reaction to this story.
As far as the bigger picture of society and compassion... I've worked at homeless shelters. I lived at a commune that ran one even, donating my work efforts to their bottom line. (It was a loooong time ago. Yes, a religious cult style commune complete with communistic dogma mixed with religious guilt.)
Since then, I've donated significant sums of money I earned to various causes and still do. I even have the photo of a nice young lady who we sponsored through one of those "help a child in need" programs. She was born September of 1994. The most recent photo on the fridge is of a happy, healthy teenager. Cheesy as it may be to have done that one, or cliche'... we gave every month since she was two years old. Didn't miss a month even when I was out of work for a year.
We don't have kids. We sometimes joke that she was a lot cheaper. LOL!
More personally and recently, I had a homeless friend living in our house. He was in a house he wasn't the owner of, the owner was gone, and the house was being foreclosed upon, had a $3500 energy bill when it all started, and the house had no electricity in the middle of winter. Temperature was about 40F most of the time. When we found out, it wasn't a question of "should we?", it was "Get over here."
Turned into an utter disaster. Friend (former friend, I don't know) moved in, well should I say I moved him in... multiple weekends of cleaning up the old place, (remember that 40F part... such fun), and my two car garage full of his stuff he "couldn't live without".
Sat down and set some goals, deadline dates, and the ground rules... ultimately of which, none were followed. Helped him get jobs, acted as a reference, and pushed and prodded while he proceeded to make himself comfortable here in my home. Everything we offered we did, including free room and board, plus more. Far more. Prescriptions for needed drugs, junk food, whatever... we did it.
We realized we had a teenager on our hands. He couldn't keep a calendar straight, couldn't get to bed on time to be up for work... it was a total nightmare. I went to work every day wondering when he'd get himself fired.
His attitude wasn't one of "I got a second chance", it was one of the victim... "I'll never move up in the world. My boss is twenty years younger than me and I hate him"... yadda yadda yadda.
I have never seen an adult so unmotivated towards anything that would better themselves in my life. When the car broke down, I had to show him how to look up how to fix it, and he'd blown the budget again (which he was hiding from us) and I bought the parts and lent him tools.
He stood around an entire Saturday until I walked outside and "showed" him how. Then after complaining that his only form of transportation was likely to die at a moment's notice, he promptly took off across town the next day to visit church friends.
No thought whatsoever to the cost or whether he could afford it. He drove around all the time in the "car that was about to die" instead of saving it's last breath to get to work and back.
When the car broke, his expectation was that I'd just pay someone to fix it, apparently. He was shocked when I said no, we'll work on it in the driveway.
See, having someone work on your car is a luxury when you're broke... I do that for MY cars now that I can afford it, but when I was broke like you, I fixed my own cars.... understand? Nope. Never got it.
Wanted to take it to a Pep Boys and have a "tune-up" done... bald tires, leaking oil, never changed or added any fluids, wouldn't read anything about basic maintenance I showed him, and was running at least one cylinder down when it arrived here... but yeah... that $150 "package" deal where they clean fuel injectors is just what it needs... uh-huh. Oh, and if you're on schedule on that budget, you don't really have $150 anyway... well, you do but it's earmarked for something else, and if those slip, your date you'll move out will slip. You committed to that date...
And then he did it anyway. Didn't make the car run a lick better. Knocked a month off the move-out date.
This went on for almost a year. We finally got him moved into an apartment, he found a good job, and it only took us two or three months longer than originally planned, and I had to move his furniture in 100F heat in a U-Haul I rented while he stood inside and told other "friends" where to put his crap. We lifted, and wrenched our backs out... he pointed.
He held the job for a few months, and I got a call one day that he was broken down somewhere. I was in a meeting on a Saturday, and by the time I got out, I called and got the story... hadn't put any oil in it since the day it left here. Seized the engine. Some other friend had come and picked him up and they were enjoying a nice Chinese food lunch. I had some mail that had come to the house, so I stopped in and dropped it off. I didn't stay for lunch. Asked him for the sixth time if he'd turned in a change of address card. No.
Eventually we just started writing "not at this address, return to sender" on stuff and putting it back in the mailbox. That was after three months of politely putting things that came in another envelope with a "Here's more mail for you" note and a request to turn in that change-of-address form and/or to notify the folks who were sending stuff here... of which most had sent five or six things.
Later I heard that after refilling it with oil, somehow they got the car to turn over and it ran again. Unbelievable.
Anyway, another couple of months go by, and I get a call... he's being evicted. Was fired for sleeping at his desk, after he stayed up all night playing video games online again. Something he did often while he was here, and I'd find myself banging on his door like he was 16, asking him if he were going to work that day.
I said, "Wow. It's going to be tough to find another job that good in this economy" and waited until he hung up the phone after a long story about how it wasn't his fault.
Never was any of it his fault. Or if you nailed him down and said it was, he would then play the "Oh, then I shouldn't even try anymore" drama card. Any other time, it was a bad/crazy boss... his past history with family problems... crazy siblings... the government... something... anything but him.
So compassion... yeah. I have it in spades for those willing to help themselves. I even have it for those who ACT like they're going to help themselves. But it does run out eventually...
Would I take another homeless friend into my home? Well... ironically I thought another friend was going to be in that same situation only a month or so after the first guy left. I still offered. This second person IMMEDIATELY rejected... "Thank you for the offer, but you'll only hear from me if I really can't make this all work out, okay?"
Yes, my friend... and thank you for helping me see the difference between someone actively trying hard every day, and the manipulator who stayed in my home.
He's doing fine. Took his kids and him flying this summer. They had a ball.
I think you're concern is somewhat unfounded -- looking for compassion on an Internet message board -- is probably a bit futile. Here we discuss things in theory, and take examples from the news to see what others think about it.
That versus what really happens in our homes... is two quite different things.
Pilots, in general, are very appreciative of the success we've had to be able to afford to fly. We're also typically very generous in real life for those who need a hand up.
What we tend to not tolerate is those who want a hand out.
I'll share the "secrets" of my path from cockroach-infested first apartment with a torn fake-leather couch in one room, a tiny TV with rabbit ears, and a mattress on the floor in the tiny bedroom... to where I am today with a manageable mortgage, one paid off car and one about to be so again. (We gave a running vehicle to my little sister, or we wouldn't have broken our rule of cash for cars. Poor dear... a NYC cab driver totaled it right after we gave it to her. She's still driving it after "her guy" patched it up. My old Jeep. She's got a Masters in Architecture and is still struggling to find a job that'll 100% support her.)
My fancy cover bestselling self-help book, will include years of multiple tough jobs at the same time, trying to attend college while holding all three, a whole lot of studying things that are boring as hell to most folks that were job-related, a bit of luck that a company needed some cheap Junior techs and then a hell of a lot of work from there to build a career, which still de-railed in the 2001 tech bubble burst, and a lot of scratching and scrimping and bad jobs to get back in.
My wife's story is similar, a Nursing degree and then scratching her way through Senior Care, Dialysis Clinics, and Home Healthcare (where at least one patient had a gun in his hand when she walked in... he was an Alzheimer's patient and was sitting at the kitchen table trying to remember how to load the gun to kill himself), and now she's "Assistant Director of Nursing" for a company who just laid off all their office staff, dumping all the paperwork on the nurses and putting her back on the streets seeing patients, along with her ADN duties.
Problem is, it's just not all that glamorous and doesn't fit in the neat little "self-help" books in the bookstore, so no one would ever want to read our little book nor follow its advice. When you lay it out on the table, people say, "You did all that?" Yeah... I did. I wanted better for myself and my wife. I screwed up a lot too, and then had to fix it. Ever stared down the gun of $30K in credit card debt? I have. I fixed it. Or should I say, WE fixed it.
My mom's side of the family moved out of state the second I graduated high school. I didn't go. I worked. My dad, I had little relationship with back then. We patched things up. The only handout I got was room and board with my grandfolks on dad's side, something I was forever indebted to them for, and my grandfather's passing was one of the saddest days of my life.
So yeah...
I have very little compassion for someone who has the ability, but won't work as hard as I have. Never will.
My heroes are people who pulled themselves out of even HARDER life circumstances and folks I meet who have the guts to run their own businesses.
Nothing was handed to me. I still give money, time, and real effort to my community in various ways. And I do care.
But I do expect folks to get up and try ... just try ... every day. I have no compassion for those who wallow in self-pity. I've been there, and done that, and it gets you nowhere. I also REALLY despise those who say government needs to save them. Government is just a huge middle-man who keeps most of the money for himself in social programs. And government isn't the answer.
Grandpa was a Great Depression kid. He taught both dad and I, "It's no sin to be broke. It's a sin to stay that way." His odd worded way of saying, "Get up, and go again."
My life view is that America really is the land of opportunity... 'cause I've lived it. I feel blessed to be where I'm at. I sneer loudly at people who jeopardize their livelihood by picking up a six-pack. People do NOT have to live that way. I could have easily crawled into a beer bottle, not gone home to study technical documentation or worked on the skills needed to move to the next job level and hung out with the guys watching sports at the sports bar every night. I chose to do something better for myself.
No school will ever have me in for "Career Night" to discuss how to scrape your way up from the bottom of the tech pool. They'll bring in the guys and gals in nice suits from the local college who are there to sell the kids on the "great jobs that await" if only they'll spend the government's student loan money at their particular higher education institution.
They won't tell the kids that the private sector only added 700,000 jobs this year, and 1.75 million people graduated from college with massive student loan debt they'll pay for the rest of their lives.
They won't tell them to look around and find things other people need done and be willing to do them at below market value for a few years, to make yourself a valued employee so you're on top of the pile when the next job comes open... and it'll take YEARS.
They won't tell them to avoid all debt like the plague that it is, nor show them the basic math of how compounding interest works to enslave millions.
Compassion? Yeah... I've got it. Where do we start telling the kids the truth... that we need people willing to work their asses off, and no... those shiny new cars on TV are for folks who already did work hard for years to SAVE for them, not to buy them on consumer debt? Buy 'em now, you'll be filing bankruptcy in a few years. How about a nice used beater pickup truck that always starts, and won't leave you stranded and that you can fix yourself?
That you can play video games all day, or only play them once a week, and learn some skills in the extra time?
That filling idle time with sex is great, but you're not prepared to be a parent nor can you afford it.
That no one makes your life go one way or another more than YOU do?
That there are people who'll pay them to do a lot of unpleasant things they don't want to, and they can turn it into a real business (that can maybe even pay its taxes)... but you'd better be ready to get up at 5AM and not hit the sack until 11PM.
That's real compassion... that there's opportunity if you're busting your ass... people WILL see it, and you will get there, but you have to make yourself do it. No one will do it for you.
My Group Commander in Civil Air Patrol is paralyzed from the waist down. He shows up, in uniform, in a motorized wheelchair and runs the largest Group in the Wing. THAT's a man who knows what living with a real Disability is like. And he excels anyway. He shows up on the field of life and plays every card he's dealt.
A truck driver suing because he can't keep from stopping at the store, buying a sixer and downing it and a Judge saying he's "disabled"? Yeah... give me a freakin' break.
