One of the goals of this blog, if it has any apart from giving me a place to deposit my brain droppings, (apologies to George Carlin) is to try to cast some light on the day-to-day realities of work in fire and EMS. You may have seen us passing by in the ambulance, gathering food in the grocery store, or speaking to your church group or your child's class. When you were a kid, you may have gone to a fire station to see the big red trucks. Perhaps a good-natured fire fighter let you sound the siren. And certainly, you've seen us portrayed in a thousand TV shows and movies.
But none of that really gives you an idea of who we really are. Who are those people, who, when you pass by an accident on a rainy night, are climbing into the crumpled remains of a car? Who are the people in bunker gear crawling into a burning building? And why the hell do they do it?
Let's start with the obvious answer to the latter question: we don't do it for the money. Firefighters on large municipal departments are paid and compensated well. The rest of us have to work mulitple jobs just to get by. And volunteers, of which there are many, do it for no money at all. So, why? When the public asks, we'll tell you that it has something to do with public service, and with making a difference in people's lives. And those things are true. But there's more to it than that. There are any number of ways to serve one's fellow man that don't involve the stresses and dangers of emergency services. But we've chosen this life. The reasons why are probably as myriad as the people who chose to do it, and many of those people can't give you a very good answer. For a lot of us, it just seems right.
Answering the second question isn't much easier. Who are we? The shortest and most direct answer is probably, "We're people." And that's true. We're family men and women, perpetual bachelors, aspiring intellectuals and lovers of reality TV who've never picked up a book we weren't assigned. We're risk takers and risk averse. We're pious and profane. As a group, we contradict ourselves and contain multitudes.
There you are then-a wordy answer that is no answer at all. But the truth is that our reasons for choosing this line of work are as we are. Ask a thousand insurance salesmen why they do what they do, and the answers will probably be fairly similar: it's something that pays reasonably well and that they can tolerate doing from day to day. I suspect that for first responders, the answers, while varying wildly, might fall into a few categories.
Some of us are keeping up a family tradition. Fire and police departments are thick with tradition, so it's perhaps appropriate that joining them is often a tradition within families. Some are thrill-seekers and glory hounds. Thankfully, they don't usually last very long. Others are truly motivated by the desire to help. Yet others want to be challenged. Most of us take some from column A, some from column b, etc.
It's also true that many of us just aren't suited for whatever it is that goes on in normal offices and workplaces. I tend refer to us as the island of misfit toys. It's hardly original, but it fits.
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