From the Training:
Certified E-SAT Practitioner

I found this old song and one passage really kind of got me.

It goes like this… 

The younger me would’ve dismissed it outright.
The older me was struck by the honesty and complexity of it. 

Here is a man who loves his child enough to show up…
and yet his struggles hinder how he shows up. 

Our society tends not to like that kind of complexity. 

We want people to be one thing and not the other.
Good never bad. Right never wrong.

But that’s not how people work.
And it’s not how we should treat others.

We can’t ignore the wrong…
but we also shouldn’t ignore the good.

Students bring us their struggles, mistakes, and failed attempts every day.
And we’re asked to respond in a way that is both accountable and compassionate and that’s not easy. 

Especially when you’re responding to threats and dangerous behaviors. 

It requires us to hold two truths at the same time. 

This behavior matters.
And so does the person. 

We must see both the risk and the potential.

Great leadership means not turning away from either one. 

That father in the song had it wrong in some ways.
But he also got it right in others. 

Is one more important than the other? 

In April of 2018, police officers in Detroit made an urgent call over the radio asking truck drivers to park their rigs beneath a bridge. 

By doing so, they reduced the distance of a potential fall from twenty feet to just six feet, ultimately helping save the life of a person who was preparing to jump and end his life.

I remember watching this and thinking—who were these people?

A parked truck makes no money. Time is money to truckers, and yet they stopped what they were doing and showed up for a stranger they didn’t know and would never meet again. 

It makes me wonder… 

If I applied today’s standard that a person must be all good and never do any wrong, how many of those truckers would’ve been dismissed before they ever had the chance to do something good like help save a life? 

Or are we supposed to believe that the only thirteen flawless people in Detroit just happened to show up that night? 

Life can be messy and it has a way of humbling you. 

The older I get and the more I interact with people the more I recognize that most aren’t all good or all bad but a mixture of both, doing the best they can with what they have, and sometimes coming up short. 

When I was an SRO, I would go into the gym and read the names of the students who held the athletic records. Their names were stenciled on the cinderblocks. 

Most pullups, fastest run, longest broad jump, and so on. 

The majority of these outstanding athletes were students I had interacted with in an official capacity. I couldn’t help but think to myself… 

If only. 

Sometimes people choose the wrong road and there’s not a lot we can do.
But no one should choose that path because it’s the only one we gave them. 

We must hold each other accountable but never stop believing in each other. 

We must stay engaged in the messiness of life. 

That means clearly seeing both the risk and the potential, especially in students.
To take behavior seriously without writing off any good they may be trying to do. 

Certainly the father in the song needed to make some corrections.
But he still walked through the door, and that should matter for something. 

People are messy, life is messy.
Sometimes the good is difficult to see but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 

I don't know which one is worse. 

Doing the wrong thing…
or becoming so focused on the bad that you can no longer see the good.