Everybody’s up to something – by Michael Morse

by Michael Morse, contributing writer

My daughter’s first job after college was at a restaurant. It was a lively place in a trendy area, a place to see and be seen. She saw a lot there; high rollers and the sycophants who surrounded them, drugs and debauchery on parade nightly. She was convinced that the world was a crooked place by the time she left, and nothing I could say from my modest little corner of the world would change her mind.

“Everybody is up to something,” she would tell me. “And the people who are honest don’t stand a chance.”

I couldn’t help but take her views personally. I had been working eighty-hour weeks for years, drove a twenty-year-old car, looked older than I was, and owned one suit, reserved for weddings and funerals.

It was difficult to argue against her position. My own world experience showed me a similar view. Working as a firefighter on an EMS rig in the inner city was an eye opener. The culture I encountered was “take what you can get away with and leave the crumbs for the suckers.” There were winners, and there were losers, and the people good at playing the game appeared to be winning.

I had one advantage though. I saw behind the curtain. I witnessed first-hand the price paid for the illusion of success. I saw fatherless children living in crummy tenement houses, women struggling to provide, waiting for the first of the month for their government checks so they could fill their refrigerators and put a little gas in their unregistered, uninsured vehicles.

I saw the boys masquerading as men playing the game, strutting through the ghetto like kings in their fancy cars with tinted windows. I saw them on the streets in their little gangs, wheeling and dealing, in and out of jail, sometimes shot, sometimes shooting.

I had to let my daughter learn for herself that the players were being played. Theirs was a short-term strategy, one that never ends well. Theirs is a world of tricksters and illusion, fast cash and faster crashes.

The world I choose to inhabit is an honest one, one with small daily rewards, one that values integrity and avoids deception. My world is built on solid ground from which a foundation is able to strengthen with slow, steady progress of productive achievement and does not collapse when hardship finds me. And hardship finds all of us eventually, even the people all dressed up playing the look-at-me game with money on loan from a bank of dishonesty that has no mercy when things get difficult.

The world is indeed a crooked place, but ultimately those who can find the straight and narrow path through it will find peace, freedom and satisfaction at days’ end. My daughter got out of her first job with her integrity intact and is now raising her family the right way. If you must be up to something make that something honestly, because in the end, that is what matters most.

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Michael Morse spent 23 years as a firefighter/EMT with the Providence Fire Department before retiring in 2013 as Captain, Rescue Co. 5. He is an author of several books, most offering fellow firefighter/EMTs and the general population alike a poignant glimpse into one person’s journey through life, work and hope for the future. He is a Warwick resident.