For those keyboard warriors who never leave their safe redoubts, please allow me to call into session a class called POLICE REALITY.

Now, I know most of the millennials’ only experience in combat is with their Chinese-made computer games. But if you sneak your cowardly ass out into the real streets, you will find there are people who are all too willing to stuff your head in a sack and mail it to your mother–postage due.

Now for a minute, you decide to be a police officer, which contrary to our current times, is anathema to you and people who think like you, if you can call it thinking. But suspend your synthetic world for a moment and imagine someone has called you and no one else for help. They are in trouble and you are the only one that can help them, for you are the police.

You arrive in your marked police car and walk in to the trouble, whatever it is, dressed in your nice police uniform, which blares out authority before you open your mouth. Suddenly, your heart beats hard behind your vest, because you are now face-to-face with a larger, angry man ready to mail your head to your mother-postage due. You don’t have time to determine why he is angry, but you know it from his eyes and the names he is calling you.

You see blood on his T-shirt and sweat pouring from every pore in his body. He teeth are clenched, when he isn’t calling you every name in the Urban Dictionary. He threatens your life and suddenly you are in deep trouble. You examine his hands. They are empty, except there is blood covering his fingers. From a room down a long hall, you hear the moaning of a woman. You ask a stupid question. “What’s going on here?” And the angry, sweating, bloody man recites your family tree in terms you never have heard before. In fact, he crowns his speech by ordering you to go do something that is anatomically impossible.

You are alone, but you radio for back up, but that help is minutes away. You try to go down the hall, but the man blocks your path with his muscular arm. You step back, because your academy training taught you how to de-escalate a potential violent situation. You hear more moans coming from a back room, but this time you can hear some words, too. “Help me.”

You take another step towards the hall, but this time the man steps in your way and pushes you back with his bloody hand. He begins to taunt you and dare you to get pass him. Your mind races back to your academy days for an answer, but your adrenaline and fear are blocking your thoughts.

This is not a computer game, daffodil. This is real. The angry man outweighs you, is taller than you, has blood on his clothes and hands and there is someone in the backroom calling for help. And for the time being, you are alone. What do you do?

You take a deep breath and advance towards the man and order him to put his hands behind his back, as he is under arrest for touching your nice blue shirt with his bloody hand. He laughs at you, and you catch his eyes looking at your gun.

You call for back up, again, as the man resists every order you give him.

Then it happens. He lunges at you and now you are fighting a stronger but unarmed man–but is he?

Suddenly in the back of your mind, you remember what you learned in the academy. When ever a police officer is in a fight with an unarmed man, because you have a gun on, that man is no longer unarmed, because if he defeats you, he will take your gun and kill you. So,you are now fighting for your life. You have a taser, but you need both of your hands to defend you gun, which is holstered on your hip, inches away from his bloody hands. The seconds feel like minutes. You smell the stench of stale alcohol on his breath. His spit is dripping in your face. Yes, you are on your back fighting for your life, because he wants your gun.

What do you do next?

Is this real? Yes, cupcake, it is. It happens everyday throughout the United States. Last year there were 147 police officers killed on duty in the United States, with another 103 already this year. And as you are fighting to protect your gun and life, you remember some craven politician calling for your police department to be disbanded.

Now do you feel alone?