What now?

This will be quick.

I know that the reality is that President Elect Trump will not be able to make many large legislative changes to our countries laws.  Congress has proven for the past 6 years that they are more than capable of completely shutting down the legislative process, and I do not doubt that the moderate and level headed members of our House and Senate will insure that he does not do long term damage to the majority of our legacy laws and policies.  Our checks and balances will work.

There are those in our country that have now been given permission to openly voice their hatred and their bigotry for anyone that does not fit their ideas of what an American is.  Our policies may not change, but the day to day lives of women, people of color, LGBTQA, Muslims and Jews are now changed.  We now live in a country who voted for a man that has talked repeatedly about how little he thinks of these groups.  Whether or not he personally believes these things, and I think we can all agree how much he hates women at a minimum, he has created an environment where this is acceptable in the public sphere.  Policies may not change, but the atmosphere in our country will, and that takes significantly longer to change.

I think that might be my greatest frustration with some of those people who speak like there would have been no great difference between Hillary and Trump, because there is a huge difference between a Clinton and a Trump presidency.  It is the tone, it is how we are perceived in the world, it is how we deal with those around us, and it is how the next four years of the lives of the minority are affected.

I have fears as to what this means for me, as a women in uniform, as a service member generally.  “He will surround himself with qualified advisors” is not comforting to me.  We have become more involved in conflicts around the world with a President that promised to end our involvement in the two wars we were in when he entered office, we are still in both countries, and we have expanded.

Will I wallow in despair?  Fuck no!  I will continue to do my job, live my life, and do everything in my power to improve my community and country.  I will focus on protecting the rights of my fellow human beings, and using what privilege I have to make sure they are as safe as I can make them.

But please don’t sit there and pretend that this election, and these results mean the same as if we had elected a highly qualified, incredibly competent women, that was a career politician.  That some how our country is slightly better off than if Clinton was elected, that this result will inspire our country to get off their asses and fight for change (it very might do that, but how long will it take to heal the damage done from four years of Trump).  And for fucks sake, don’t tell me to calm down, that it won’t be that bad, that I am over reacting.

Do speak to those who are scared, and discount their fear.  You are not providing them comfort, even if you feel that is what your are trying to do, you are telling them that their concerns are not important.  You are telling us, those of us that are scared and terrified about how these next four years will shape our lives, how these next four years will permanently change who we are, that these fears are not real.  That is not helpful.  Offering us a shoulder, an ear, and unlimited support is what we need.  Promising to be there with us, and for us, through whatever may come, that is helpful.

So, for all those POC, LGBTQA, Muslims, Jewish, Service members and Veterans, sexual assault victims and survivors, and all of those other groups or individuals who are unsure of, and or scared of what is to come next.  I am with you, I love you, I support you, and we will endure this together.  We will continue to fight for a country where all are accepted, loved and protected.  Some of us while in uniform, and with our lives, and some of us in many other ways.

 

The Mission At Home

I find it difficult to believe that it has been almost a year since my last post.  Then I think back to everything that has occurred over the course of the past year, and it makes more sense why writing has fallen to the wayside. Illness, injury, surgeries and recoveries have dominated my life for the past 11 months, and as I find myself finally coming out of the other side of recovering I can look back on the process with some insight.  Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say, but the lessons learned are constant.

I had the unique experience of being a part of  The Mission Continues first Mass Deployment, to Detroit, MI.  1 week, 5 days of service, 4 project sites, 4000+ hours of community service.  A couple of other fun statistics they didn’t include in the initial information, 3 amazing roommates, 74 other incredible veterans, countless national staff that coordinated and planned the whole thing, and approximately 4-5 hours of sleep every night.  Plus the added benefit of returning to work looking like you spent a week street fighting, bruises everywhere.

I have been volunteering with The Mission Continues for about a year and a half now.  I found it after seeing some friends from Team RWB posting about it on Facebook.  Engaging with other veterans has been essential for me to maintain happiness and balance in my life.  When I disengage from the veteran community, I disengage from life and that is when I fall into depressive episodes and let my health slide.  Team RWB is good, but most of it is physical activities, and my health was suffering, I wasn’t able to participate as much.

The service projects I found with the Minneapolis 1st Platoon I could do when I was sick, weak, and recovering from injuries.  I didn’t have to be in a perfectly healthy mental place, I could be engaged at any level I was comfortable with and still be a part of the work.  It was exactly what I needed.  I found the monthly projects to be a constant that I could rely upon, something small that I could look forward to and be engaged with the community and my fellow veterans.  As I got better physically and emotionally I became more engaged, and looking for more ways to get involved.

Enter Motown Muster.  A first time operation where 75 veterans would be brought from all over the country to do 5 days of service projects in Detroit.  It was competitive.  I had to apply, do a phone interview, and sit on pins and needles (or just checking my email compulsively) until I found out I had gotten in.  When I got the email I actually screeched at work.  At this point my coworkers were used to my random sounds, so they were not phased.  Trying to explain to them what I was getting the opportunity to do though, it was like trying to explain the nuances of the commerce clause to my dog Frodo.  One thing was for sure, they were excited for me simply because of how excited I was.

I probably had a difficult time explaining it because I didn’t fully know what I was getting into.  As we got closer to the date, June 23rd-30th, and more information came to us, I found out I was going to be a Team Leader for some projects every day.  There were moments of panic, because I was certainly not prepared to have any responsibility at all.  After my initial panic, and self doubt, I turned to my old reliable method of coping, I figured I could just use false confidence until I figured out what I was going to do.

Now how to describe 7 days in Detroit without writing an entire book.  It is not possible.  I am still processing everything that I experienced, felt, did, etc.  I feel as if there will be multiple blog posts over the course of the upcoming weeks, each tackling an aspect of that week.  For now I just needed to get something out, put something out there to make it real for a moment.

I left Iraq in April 2008 and Afghanistan in September 2012 feeling like I had done nothing.  It is important for people to understand that this was a feeling of personal failure, not commentary on the wars themselves.  I saw destruction, disease, women and children being ignored and used as political pawns, entire cities and towns left in pieces.  Schools destroyed, an entire generation of children not being educated, an entire generation of children growing up ignored.  There was no urgency or desire to rebuild, because as long as the war was still going on there was always the chance it was going to be destroyed again.

When I got home, I saw so much of the same here, in the very country that I left to protect against what I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was incredibly disheartening. Detroit is the perfect example of how we have neglected our own country, our cities, our children, the most vulnerable of our citizens.  Detroit is the example of our failures as a country.

Getting an opportunity to go and be a part of the healing and rebuilding of Detroit also gave me a chance to address those feelings of disappointment in myself.  I was not there with 74 other people to “Save” Detroit, I was lending a hand, providing manual labor and supplies to the people already working to bring their city back to the glory it was.

That is what I want people to ultimately get from the stories I will relay.  Detroit is alive, Detroit has never been dead.  There are people there that never left, they never gave up on Detroit, even when the country turned its back on the city that single handily fueled World War II with its manufacturing capabilities.  When Detroit comes back it will not be because of the organizations that swooped in to “save” Detroit, it will be because of the people that stayed in Detroit and kept it alive.

I came home on the 30th and I had a day of sleeping, and eating until I went home for the 4th of July.  I returned to work today, and I didn’t want to.  I felt like I needed more time, I felt like I needed to think about it more, write about it more, really process it all.  But, the rest of the world goes on.  Detroit continues to thrive, and I must continue to work.  I must take what I saw and learned from Detroit and bring it with me to Minneapolis.  I must take the joy, love, energy and enthusiasm from all the other Mission Continues veterans I met in Detroit and channel it to begin to work in my community here in Minneapolis because Detroit is just an example.  We have problems like Detroit all over our country, and I know we have many of the same issues here in Minneapolis.

As I unpack what I learned, and what I can bring to 1st platoon here in Minneapolis as the new Platoon leader come August, I will look over all the pictures everyone is sharing remember that no matter how desperate things may look, there is nothing that cannot be achieved when you get 75 highly motivated people together, give them a mission, 94% of the supplies, an amazing service dog, and love. 

Motown Muster crew following the last service project with Recovery Park in Detroit, MI.

No Clever Title

All of my other posts I have been able to think up a clever (in my opinion) title to draw the reader in, this one has no clever title.

I have been struggling with how to write this post for quite some time.  How diplomatic and political I should be, since some of the people I will be writing about have the very real potential to see it.  Should I speak to these people about my concerns and frustrations first?  Or publish a vague, but obvious enough, blog post and wait for them to figure it out?  After nearly 2 months of trying to figure out an answer, I found out that I don’t have one.

In the past couple of months I have experienced some incredibly horrendous examples of leadership on multiple fronts.  I believe I can speak on leadership with a level of expertise because I have been trained in it, and I have witnessed both tremendous, and terrible, examples of it over my almost 13 years with the military.  However, these are still just my opinions.  Everyone approaches leadership differently.  I like to consider myself mature enough to recognize that even though I may not agree with how someone is leading, does not mean they are bad at it.

The people I am going to write about, I can honestly say, are very bad at it.

Person one, military leader.

Poor, poor communications skills can destroy whatever other positive leadership attributes someone can have.  If you cannot communicate what your goals, ideas and guidance is, how the fuck am I supposed to accomplish my mission.  From not passing information onto soldiers, to flat out not making decisions about what needs to be done and then leaving it up to your subordinates (not delegating, deflecting) drains an organization.  My pet peeve is communication.  Especially in this day and age, where all it takes is a text message that can take you 10 seconds to write, there is no excuse for not keeping your soldiers in the loop every single hour of every single day if needed.  I believe you can be a good military leader without having deployed, however when it is pretty obvious you hung out in a unit that was non-deployable to avoid a deployment, then you makes snide comments about the issues your soldiers are dealing with after their deployments?  Yeah, suck a cock dude.

That is really a rant.  Sorry for that.  The heart of my issue with this leader is how he is destroying a program that took years to build up into a respected learning institution.  The program continues because of the dedication of the soldiers beneath him, it continues in spite of him.  We are doing a damn well job, imagine how much better we could be doing if we had amazing, or even average, leadership?

Person two, civilian managers

Ughhh…I separated the two because they usually have two very different skill sets.  I consider myself a competent NCO, I don’t know how well I would manage in the civilian world, mostly because my vocabulary would be limited.

Let me start by saying this, you can be an amazingly nice and caring person, and really be friendly and super nice to those you are given the opportunity to manage, and be a terrible manager at the same time.  I think some people (those without proper training) equate being nice and liked by your employees as being a good manager.  You are wrong.  Things I look for in a good manager is someone that can sit me down and articulate what I need to do to improve my performance at work, and guide me through those steps in a way that works best for both of us.  Someone that has earned respect through demonstration of knowledge and authority, not because you buy us donuts.  That is not respect peeps, that is because we like donuts.  You have to be able to learn about your employees and figure out which way is best to communicate to them.  Some people do better through emails, some face to face so there is no misunderstanding.  Some people are okay being corrected in a group, others need to be in private.  Failure to take the time to figure this stuff out, failure to even want to figure this stuff out, results in poor management issues.

When people are working in an emotionally toxic, or severely stressful, work environment it effects there health.  Since the new year I had been feeling terrible.  Migraines 5 days a week, nausea, no appetite, no desire to work out (even though I wanted to get back in shape) a constant pain in my upper shoulders, and I was drinking way more than I should have been.  I finally figured it out when a month ago I got so upset about going to work one Monday, I threw up in the shower and preceded to cry and huddle on the bottom of the tub (picture it!)  I left work, and started at a new place, and within 3 days most of these symptoms subsided.  I started sleeping through the night on most nights, the headaches are gone, appetite back and everything else.  I was feeling much better.  A terrible working environment did that to me.  My new place of employment had many of the same people, it was the exact same type of work and hours, the only real difference was the management.  See what I am getting at here?

Bad leadership makes people physically ill sometimes.  Sadly, the leaders are almost never effected.

Person three, Non profit leadership

This one hurts the most for me to write about, because it hurts a lot of people, and damages a lot of potential good in the world.  I wanted to be as involved in the veteran’s community when I got home as possible.  I wanted to keep that connection, and most importantly help other veterans who didn’t have the support system (I thought) I had when I got home.  I joined the VFW but have not been as active as I wanted to be, I just don’t feel like I can connect to a bunch of older white men.  I looked into Team Rubicon but had to focus on finishing law school and let it fall to the way side (for now.) I found a lot of good people, and good support, in Team RWB while I was studying for the Bar Exam.

A non profit organization I have been a part of for nearly two years, shall remain anonymous for this post, designed to reconnect veterans to their communities, has such incredible potential to help veterans, and civilians, reconnect and improve everyone’s lives.

Now, now our best volunteers are stepping back, because they are devalued, treated poorly and discounted.  For me the worst part is that a good chunk of the volunteers stepping back from the organization are veterans, those that it was founded to help.  This one person, this one incompetent leader, is slowly destroying what our chapter of the organization is capable of achieving, when it is needed most.  My personal experience with this individual was so upsetting, I almost completely left the organization.  I stopped going to events, I stopped engaging with those I knew from it, I dropped off the map when I needed these people the most.  When I was going through such a hard transition time, this person pushed me away.  It may not have been their intention, but it was the result.  Now I see it happening to so many of our other dedicated volunteers.  It angers me, but more than that it hurts to know that other veterans are suffering because of this.

Take away, grand poomba of guidance and wisdom…I don’t have any idea.  Fuck, I am 31, I know nothing.  I barely feel like an adult 95% of the time.

I guess my grand point, from my perspective is, if you are going to be in a leadership position, if you are going to have the blessed opportunity to get to manage and lead people, work hard at it.  Learn all you can about how to lead, how not to lead, what to do to take what you have and improve it.  I learned more about how to be a leader by watching people fail at it, then deciding that I would not make the same mistakes they did.  I learn more from bad leaders than good.  Sadly that is because I have spent more time around bad leaders than good leaders.

I will leave you with one last thought.  If you find people are abandoning your organization, team, unit, at a rate that suggests they are rats escaping a dying ship, don’t look at them and wonder what they have done to fail at working with you, look at yourself and wonder how you have failed them as their leader.  If you are the only one standing on your team, it is not because you are that amazing, it is because you have failed your team that hard.