Who will save the Saviors?

To: State Politicians, City Managers, Chiefs and Fire-Service Members: 8/17/2025

Someone is going to die. Someone that should have lived. Someone painfully waiting for competent care that doesn’t come. Someone you may know: Your stroking grandfather, your fallen mother, your diabetic brother… a choking or poisoned child. - Tragedy that could be avoided.

It is not a matter or if, but when.

Then that will be the catalyst for change. It always is. When someone of “importance” perishes during a call that is not answered on time, despite the protective redundancies.

You will then have a choice to make: Be accountable, and accept responsibility for the scrutiny that will follow, or shed it as happenstance, normal, and point the finger at someone else.

“Sorry” will not cut it.

People will demand: How could this have happened!? Who is responsible? What could have been done? That will be the multimillion-dollar question. That is the difference between a cross on the side of a road and a road to recovery. That will be the people outside the board meeting with anger in their voice with painted signs.

You are supposed to be the good-guys. The smart ones.

Here is why it could happen:

Ego and disrespect. Because EMS employee morale was throttled in your quest for dominance over them. They will leave.

Greed or neglect. The stewards entrusted to provide employee compensation at a base-level have embezzled the funds while the board tandemly votes NO to a reasonable living wage. They will leave.

POLITICS. Fiscal constraints of taxes? Pennies saved on the dollar, rather than providing a higher standard of living for the life-savers, which benefits the ones they would be assisting. They WILL leave.

I will speak plainly, as both a man over the hill and a longtime business owner….

This failure is not a difficult scenario to predict, and when you look at the rapid decay of living standards over the last decade, it becomes more than incompetence. It is neglectful. Foolish. Even cruel, depending on perspective.

These young men and women enter the work-force pledging to give their life-force on this Earth, in the service of others. This, after YEARS of saturated and expensive schooling, with no financial assistance, just debt. They are then thrown headfirst into a system where all sides of the job are difficult… but they keep SHOWING UP for it, because they care for other humans and their dignity. They made a promise to you.

They show up for all the “frequent fliers” that abuse the system for a ride to the hospital; the diabetics, alcoholics and drug addicts that continually make terrible life choices causing the "tones" waking them at 2 am. The combative car accidents, and aggressive policeman at the scene that are ready to tase an altered brain-trauma victim. They show up for the dead baby in a toilet. They show up for your structure fire to save your - everything.

These are WORST days of someone’s life, to no fault their own, and they keep showing up, ready to go, in an industry that treats them as if they were expendable. Worthless. A liability, rather than THE MOST IMPORTANT ASSETS in the room.

And, it is not a compulsive position. They DECIDE to be there.

Remember that, because one day, it may be YOU on your worst day, painfully waiting. The politics and budget will not even be a thought that day. All you will plead for, under the dark empty sky, is for someone to show up, and if you are fine with this arrangement, “maybe” someone actually will.

You decide now, with how you plan on treating them, and you had better do it fast.

-The Aware Rural Residents of America